All right, Randy. It looks like everybody has joined the call. You may begin.
Thank you, Mike. Welcome to the Legend Power Systems fiscal Q1 2026 investor call. I'm Randy Buchamer, Legend's Chief Executive Officer. We're pleased to have you join us on the call today to discuss our corporate progress, financial results fiscal Q1, which were the 3 months that ended December 31, 2025. Please note that certain statements in this call may be forward-looking in nature. These include statements involving known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. For more information about Legend's forward-looking statements and risk factors, please see our management discussion analysis, which was filed on SEDAR under our company profile at sedarplus.ca.
We held an IR call about 30 days ago. Rather than repeating the same issues in detail, we'll summarize on our previously discussed challenges and update you on our progress over the last 30 days. I'm joined by Paul Moffat, who is our Chief Operating Officer and acting CFO, and Mike Cioce, who is Vice President, Sales and Marketing. Paul will provide an update on the various operational units under his leadership. During last month's IR call, Mike discussed the extraordinary challenges that affected our sales last year and into fiscal 2026. He will update you on our progress addressing the challenges over the last 30 days. As discussed in that IR call 30 days ago, we have operated in a tight cash environment for the last couple of years, and fiscal 2026 Q1 was also a tight cash quarter.
We continued to make the necessary expense and operational cost reductions to keep our momentum going, including having several leadership members deferring salaries from September to January. The team members were paid back only 75% of the salaries owed as a contribution to conserve cash. We also completed a financing grossing over CAD 1.65 million in late January 2026. Thank you to one of our directors, Jonathan Lansky and Sean Peasgood, IR specialists, for their help with that endeavor. In previous years and system generations, purchasing decisions were made on industry-standard energy-saving methodologies. Previous system versions cost sometimes CAD 40,000-CAD 100,000, and installations were CAD 20,000-CAD 30,000. Today's systems can be CAD 125,000-CAD 250,000, and installs can be CAD 100,000-CAD 300,000 and up.
Decisions can't be justified simply on energy savings like they were in the past, but combined with non-energy savings. Without an industry-standard methodology that measures non-energy savings, prospects have questioned the validity or how impartial non-energy savings calculations are. This skepticism that Mike discussed last IR call led to some deal closing delays. He'll discuss how we're managing this challenge and how the combination of energy and non-energy savings provides very attractive SmartGATE business returns. We also continue to be frustrated with continued U.S. government flip-flops on programs and policy changes that have deferred significant orders. Mike will talk about that. Expected commitments have been seriously delayed due to government intervention, including complete departmental shutdowns or elimination, changing of programs, et cetera. To be clear, we have not lost, nor do we expect to lose any U.S. government business.
We have experienced delays but expect good order flow. We also, with Paul's leadership, continue to lower our component costs, increase our system margins. Their substantial reviews have been conducted to source either new vendors or better pricing to reduce our costs. We expect to achieve 50% margins plus during the year. In summary, we really do see more opportunity than ever before. SmartGATE interest is strong. We're close on numerous large multiple-year deals, and in-field system performance has been absolutely outstanding. Importantly, while the green investing sector has faced political challenges, Legend Power Systems' value proposition transcends political narratives. Over the last year or so, power quality and the cost of bad power are being highlighted. We're seeing more and more devices and demands on power and the grid.
By delivering lower costs, increased profitability, and reduced risk, we can provide enduring value rooted in traditional business fundamentals. Mike will show you today a new tool we have to help highlight the impact of SmartGATE on building performance and the financial aspects, and hopefully, you'll find that quite interesting. We see a bright Legend future, and the Legend team is absolutely committed to make Legend Power a success story. Paul, if you would, walk us through the operational update, please.
Sure. Thanks, Randy. Hello to everyone on the call. The revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 was CAD 252,000, compared with CAD 81,000 the same quarter of fiscal 2025. That's entirely due to the fact that we built additional systems in this quarter. Demand and volumes are increasing. Gross margin, I'm happy to report, in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 was 44%, and that's compared with 15% in the same quarter of fiscal 2025. Also, quarter-over-quarter, the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the margin was 25%. We've seen increases both year-over-year and quarter-to-quarter. Increase in gross margin, compared to the first quarter of 2025 was primarily due to the quantity of systems built.
The reduction of cost of goods sold that we're seeing both on one, originally a large component, and we're going into another large component reduction, and the lack or the lower installation activity, which is a lower margin activity. We see an increase in our gross margin accordingly. Separately, equipment gross margin was 47%, which is great. That's mixed dependent, but that has increased, and it looks very well in line with our price modeling. We had a services gross margin of 80%. If we combine those, and we normalize for a full factory utilization, our overall gross margin for the first quarter of 2026 would achieve and exceed 50%.
Very happy to see that, and, as Randy mentioned, we'll see improvements over the year as, more of the reduced priced, materials come into play. The company's operating expenses for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 were CAD 631,000 compared with CAD 1,040,000 in the same quarter of fiscal 2025. Again, the primary cause for decrease was lower headcount, lower salaries, services, consulting costs, as a result of a lot of the continuous improvement work that we've been doing and other internal cost-cutting measures. In operations, three of our backlog systems have shipped since our last meeting. We're shipping almost one a week, which is great, and that's contributing, of course, to our invoicing and our accounts receivable.
Five are remaining to ship, those will go out by early summer, potentially as early as April, May. Cash, again, cash management, as Randy has mentioned, is a top priority. Accounts receivable from our backlog now totals over CAD 300,000. As well as the recent financial raise, these both support our ongoing operational costs. Although generally flat over the last month, inventory has moved. It's moved into production. We see an increase of work in progress and finished sub-assembly levels, as orders are being transformed into finished goods and getting ready for shipment. Operating expenses reduced from CAD 347,000 per month the prior year and CAD 217,000 the prior quarter to CAD 210,000 per month in the first quarter of 2026.
Additional initiatives are underway. We're going to see some further increases in those operational costs. As reported previously, management continues to monitor and cost-cutting opportunities, both cash and cost-cutting opportunities very closely. We're reducing our overall expenditure in support of working capital and growth objectives. Cost reductions continue. Lead time reductions are happening. They've shortened. Gross margin initiatives are all underway, all aligned with our operational objectives and our budget for fiscal 26. Thanks, everyone. I'll pass it over to Mike.
Thanks, Paul, thanks, Randy, and thank you all for attending today. Again, last time we met, the core concern was deal stagnation, driven by some skepticism around our non-energy financial value. I wanna focus today on what's actually changed in the last 2 weeks. The short answer is we now have early confirmation that our hypothesis was correct and that the path to resolving it is progressing quickly, and it's working. We structured our response around three pillars, which is financial clarity around the problems we solve, third-party credibility, and real customer evidence. All three have advanced meaningfully in a very short period of time. Today is less about new messaging and more about operational progress against the plan.
First of all, on financial clarity, the first objective was to remove the burden on the customers to interpret power conditions and operating realities into their own specific economics on their own. Historically, electric reach optimized technologies, including ours, were evaluated primarily through the lens of energy savings and simple payback, as Randy mentioned. That worked when project costs were small and operational decisions could be justified through efficiency alone. The reality is that infrastructure-level decisions are made differently, and they are evaluated based on predictability of operating costs, capital planning stability, and avoided disruption, not just reduced consumption and expenses. The challenge in our category has been that most of the financial impact of electrical conditions does not appear on the utility bill. It shows up as maintenance variability, shortened equipment life, cycles, and unplanned capital replacements.
The reality is customers experience those costs, but they're fragmented across operating and capital budgets and rarely quantified together. The market has historically been in an unusual position. Customers acknowledge the operational problem but lack a structured financial framework to act on it. Recently, we've built and began deploying a standardized way to translate those electrical operating conditions into financial exposure, and I'll demonstrate that shortly, but the key update is behavioral. We now have a repeatable method to move conversations away from theoretical efficiencies and towards financial stability and life cycle cost modeling. That's a quick update on the first pillar. The second pillar is the third party credibility. In parallel, we've initiated independent validation and integration of credible third party data sources into our tools.
As many of you are aware, we have been underway with the GSA and the Green Proving Ground on our first implementation with them, and that GSA data collection project and process is now underway, and we're kicking off our work with them starting this week, so we're excited about that. We've also incorporated our third party partner operational data sets from their real world results across tens of thousands of buildings into the same financial frameworks, allowing external operating experience to align with the modeled outcomes that we're talking about. This matters because the conversation transitions from vendor interpretation to measurable infrastructure behavior, so we're very excited about that. The third pillar is the customer evidence, the customer financial evidence. Again, it's real customer financial reporting.
We're actively working with two customers to assemble maintenance histories, replacement timing and capital events against electrical operating conditions over years before and after installation of a SmartGATE. This takes a little bit longer to mature, but we are already seeing the expected pattern. The majority of cost exists outside the energy bill, and therefore financial results and value have been historically underestimated. This pillar ultimately becomes a very strong adoption driver because it moves the conversation from projected value to experienced financial outcomes. With that said, before I transition to the tool, I want to clarify what this tool is and what it is not. It is not a traditional ROI calculator designed to produce a payback period. Historically conversations around electrical infrastructure upgrades have centered on efficiency and energy savings.
That works when, as we said earlier, when operational decisions are costs are small and easily quantified through simple payback. Infrastructure level decisions are made differently, as we discussed earlier. They're evaluated based on financial exposure, capital planning and avoided disruption, not just consumption. As I mentioned, that the difficulty has been that most of it is not felt on the utility bill. Because these costs are fragmented and they really get escalated together, customers agree there is a problem, but we have to challenge them to quantify the financial consequences of leaving it unmanaged. The purpose of this tool is to illuminate the full financial picture. It translates electrical operating conditions into 3 financial outcomes: exposure to unbudgeted capital events, accelerated asset depreciation, and operational cost variability.
Once these are visible, the conversation naturally moves away from simple payback and towards standard financial decision metrics such as life cycle costs and net present value. What you're about to see is not about predicting savings, it's about quantifying financial risk and cost stability. We're going to show how that works. This ties very closely to a major investment we did last year, which is the voltage adherence risk. I want to spend a minute and talk about that because that does start to underline the quantification that we're going through. Again, utilities are allowed to deliver voltage across a wide range of tolerance bands, but building systems are not. They're designed to operate optimally across a very tight band. They're designed to operate optimally at their nameplate rating.
You can see here what we typically see on a 480 volt building is the grid can provide anywhere from 445 to 510, and they're doing their job. The challenge is that 460 is where equipment operates the best. As you move further away from that, you move into the degradation and the failure risk zones. That's, that really is the point in which this starts to come to life. As voltage drifts away from that point, the equipment still runs, but the physics change dramatically. Efficiency drops, heat rises, insulation ages faster, and components fail earlier. Again, this is usually still inside the utility compliance zone, which is very frustrating for all of us.
The grid says everything's fine, but the building experiences degraded performance, increased cost, and accelerated failure of capital building infrastructure. The question becomes not is the power acceptable, but what financial risk does operating at those voltages create for the asset owner? That's why this tool exists, because the Power Impact Report process identifies the conditions and shows the impact to these systems, but relies on our prospects to do the math, if you will, on translating each of that to each of their buildings. This tool is about modeling the building as a financial asset, operating in variable electrical environments, and builds a framework to translate that into real dollars. With that said, I'm going to go ahead and transition to our demo for the day. Let's see.
First thing we do when we get in here is when we're in the capital infrastructure risk assessment, is we define the asset because everything is every risk is different for every building. We'll enter the type of the building, the size of the building, as well as the service voltages and the operational characteristics of the building. Again, we're not estimating energy use, we're defining the electrical operating environment that the equipment lives in. You can see here that at a 480 volt building, $921,000 of premature capital risk, $1 million worth of risk exposure, increased operating costs. Again, this is all theoretical 'cause this is not actually what's happening in the building. The reality is that what we typically see is voltage ranges in the 496 volt range.
The problem is that the equipment is expecting 460 volts. As we change those and calculate those, you can see our risks triple. The risks go from $1 million to $3 million on a very manageable building. This expected premature replacement cost is created by voltage deviation over time. That you can see that as we continue to move through the rest of the calculator, we can see the net present values of a SmartGATE investment. We can also then see the yearly costs, we can see the cumulative costs. Where it really comes to life for people, for our prospects, is in getting to the level of detail that's been lacking.
That's really understanding all of the building systems that we're talking about, the dollars associated with those, the life expectancy associated with those, the service, the maintenance and repair costs of those systems. This is really where we had been previously expecting the customers to go through and do this math on their own. Now what we're doing is we're doing the framework for them and giving them the ability to go through and customize this quickly. They can go through and adjust this to build almost a digital twin of their building to really understand what the full capital expenditure, premature capital risk is for their facilities. This is where it stops kind of becoming a predictor model and moving into showing what's actually happening in the building.
Again, they discover they don't have an energy problem, but what they have is a capital planning accuracy problem. That's where the conversation fundamentally changes away from how much is this gonna save me to how much risk can this start to evaluate. This is why Active Power Management exists. Again, energy efficiency asks how much electricity did you use? Operational voltage asks what conditions was your infrastructure forced to live in while using it versus what it's designed to live in. SmartGATE controls those conditions, keeping the equipment operating at its designed voltage levels instead of the utility tolerance levels.
The decision isn't whether the building has bad power, it's whether the building owner wants their assets operating as they were engineered for performance or whether they just want to tolerate what's actually happening and all of the downtime and the premature failures that come from that. To summarize, the transition discussed in our last meeting is now operational. We have a structured way to quantify that financial exposure. We're validating it through independent third parties, and we're assembling real customer financial evidence. Again, this demonstration is very simply a mechanism that connects those three pillars into a repeatable decision framework. It provides the inflection point for our pipeline that they need to evaluate the solution through a different lens, and a much more powerful lens.
With that said, that wraps up our sales and marketing update. Randy, I will toss it back to you.
Further comment on the capital infrastructure risk assessment tool. A lot of input and work for people in the company outside of the organization. Two things I would add. One is the example Mike gave is for one building. You can imagine when people have hundreds of buildings, how staggering some of that can look in their capital budget. Secondly is people love to have a tool that helps them make decisions, and the big thing that we've lacked is a way to present it in a way that's meaningful and understanding for people to make decisions. We're very pleased with the early success of the tool. We look forward to implementing it and fine-tuning it with our customers. Good job by everybody to deliver that tool.
Just to wrap up for questions, you know, we're seeing continued alternative energy growth. We're seeing increased problems with the grid. As I said earlier, the insatiable demand for more power at higher costs. All that creates an environment for Legend solutions, and there's a huge marketplace. We continue to build our brand by working with key eco players and ensure that our brand is recognized and supported within their customer profiles. The technology continues to meet or exceed expectations. We have a growing pipeline, a clear path to strong revenue growth over the next few years. We believe we are poised to redefine the future of power optimization.
The leadership team and team members are positive about Legend's future, and we're each committed to making Legend a leading power management company. Want to thank our shareholders for their ongoing trust and partnerships as we continue this remarkable transformation in the industry. At this point, we would be delighted to take any questions you may have.
Randy, we have a couple of questions starting to come in. The first is, what is the latest available information you have regarding the timing of the completion and the public release of the report by Oak Ridge National Laboratory?
Okay. You wanna take that please?
Yeah. I'd be happy to. Again, the initial data work is underway, and we are meeting with them this week to... It's gonna come in in phases. The first phase is a 30-day phase where they do a rough view, and that's underway. We're probably 30 to 45 days away from that initial report. The final report is still expected in the September timeframe, so nothing has shifted based on that. We're very excited about where we are with Oak Ridge.
I would just add, Mike, just to be clear, we don't need the report in September, it's a large report, to support the work that we're doing. We believe the preliminary and the numbers we have there will be sufficient. We will be able to use their logo. We'll be able to use and freely submit and share that information, so it is imminent.
Definitely. Let's see. Another question that's come in is, what happens when customer complains to the utility and the utility attempts to fix? Do we have a real-world example yet?
Well, I think you can give them a couple there in New York, Mike, that.
Yeah. Certainly. Certainly.
... with substations, et cetera. Yeah.
Yeah. The reality is that the utilities. This is not a utility problem, as we've shown that they're operating within the utility standards. There have been situations where the utility has said, "Well, we can put in a new substation for your location in order to give more control," they put in the substation and nothing changes. The reality is that the utility operators have a absolutely massive infrastructure that's been developed over decades, and their ability to be able to change that and to change the operating infrastructure of that is incredibly limited. They are all. The utilities are. They do a good job. I don't want to sound like we're bashing utilities.
Utilities do a good job of staying on and staying within the standards that they've set up. What we typically explain is the problem is that the challenges are like kicking a field goal, and as long as it lands somewhere in the stadium, it counts. The reality is that the equipment itself is looking for an even narrower goalpost than what you typically see while you're kicking field goals. Again, the utilities, they're just simply not built in order to be able to give the level of granularity.
What we like to say is that the utilities are good at chainsaws, but what's needed at the building level is a scalpel, and that's exactly what the SmartGATE provides, is that scalpel. Again, we've seen. Every time we've seen a customer say, "The utility says they're gonna make it better," they do what they say they're gonna make it better, but the problem is it doesn't make it any better. It just gives them the illusion that they're doing something different. The next question is, "Is it your understanding that the non-energy calculator will be released for use by prospective customers at the same time as the Oak Ridge report is released?
If not, when?" I'm delighted to say that our user acceptance testing for the calculator is this week, and provided that we successfully hit our user acceptance testing, our new calculator or our new tool will be live starting next week. We're not waiting for that. This is too integral to changing the scope and the tenor of the conversations that we have going on. One of the big changes that this does is this tool is now actually used during our first sales call, 'cause what it does is it sets up what we're goal seeking to that capital asset reduction, that unbudgeted capital asset reduction risk. When we have alignment on that, we have a very live opportunity.
When people are focused more on the operational side of it, we know that it's not a well-aligned opportunity.
Can we...
Go ahead, Randy.
Sorry, Mike. I was just gonna say, could you share your experiences with the demos and sharing you've done with a few people, including a significant reseller?
Yes, absolutely.
Their comments on the, on the calculator?
Yes, absolutely. When we, when we showed this to some of our first friendlies that are customers, the response was very favorable and they immediately wanted to get into building out their building and putting in their system replacement costs and their system ages, so they can really start to identify that. So from a customer engagement standpoint of managing that risk, it's a very powerful tool towards that end. With one particular customer, actually, with a partner, a very large partner, and they're rolling out a new sales program, and that new sales program is all about becoming a trusted advisor. When their president saw the tool in use, the...
It was very favorable comments. It was, "This is..." One of the comments was, "This is exactly the type of conversation that shifts us from a cost-based solution provider to a trusted advisor who's managing multiple aspects of their overall business. The exact quote was, "These are exactly the types of conversations we need to be having with our prospects." Again, it's very favorable reports and results so far. Let's see. Another question... Other questions have been answered throughout this, including more about the Oak Ridge reporting and when will it be made available. One of the questions is, "Is there a revised timeframe for the completion of the multiple award process?" I'd be happy to give an update on that.
With the Multiple Award Schedule through the GSA, one of the things I do wanna say is that the report... What we're doing with Oak Ridge and what we're doing on the MAS are separate paths. They all converge in the same piece of it. The, the Oak Ridge report gives the, the proof points that everything deploys as expected. The GSA Multiple Award Schedule is a separate process for that. It's been a very frustrating experience because our first couple submissions were rejected for administrative issues. We've since gone through a very rigorous process to make sure that we have all of the administrative boxes checked and we are expecting an initial response on that revised submission any day now.
Typically, we've been in the 7 to 8-week range of our submissions, and we are hitting the 8-week range this week. We expect to hear something coming up very quickly here on our latest submission. Another question.
Any other questions?
Yeah, there's a couple other questions. Can we expect a GSA endorsement of SmartGATE after the release of the Oak Ridge National Labs report in 30 to 45 days? As far as the GSA, the GSA does not specifically endorse any technology. What the GSA is going to do is we'll have a Multiple Award Schedule in place that shows that they have vetted the solution and that it's in line with the business practices ready for purchase. The report will show that it, that the U.S. federal government, and that report that comes out in September, will show that the U.S. federal government has evaluated, they've hired Oak Ridge, Oak Ridge has evaluated, and that the tool, that the SmartGATE itself actually produces the results that it's expected.
What we expect out of the first report with the GSA is to become a standard recommendation in their Energy Savings Performance Contracts. I guess one of the nuanced differences is they're not gonna come out and specifically endorse SmartGATE, but they will add Active Power Management to a recommended solution on their Energy Savings Performance Contracts. Hope that answers the question.
I'll just add though, Mike, that the champions we do have currently at the ABA site, GSA site, have been willing to be references and help us out where required. They've been very supportive, and they were very involved in helping us craft the reports and things that would give us the output we wanted as far as Oak Ridge, et cetera. We've got a very friendly, positive, referenceable account there.
Yes. Most definitely. The thing that I'll also add to that is one of the gaps in the executive to operational branches of customers is what we call the operating environment or the voltage adherence risk. Most of the operators understand that there's a difference between nameplate rating and the acceptable standards of the grid. What's exciting is Oak Ridge is embracing that, and that they're going to actually be weighing in on the benefits of operating at the nameplate rating versus just staying within the ANSI standards. That's one of the again, one of the more exciting, compelling parts of the Oak Ridge process.
Great.
Let's see. Another question is, are we making any inroads in the data center market? Is this a big opportunity? I can say that, yes, we've had a number of conversations with data center developers, and as well as switchgear manufacturers and uninterrupted power supply providers that provide the UPSs for data centers. There's a growing acknowledgement of the fact that even UPS systems are designed to tolerate that voltage, but they're not designed to thrive in it. When you've got a multi-million dollar UPS system providing power to a data center that's worth potentially billions of dollars. There's a growing acknowledgement the fact that they wanna protect that UPS. Yes, there's...
We are seeing some positive movement there.
Yeah. I think that's pretty well the questions I think have been answered, Mike. Any additional questions anybody has?
There's one more question here, Randy. It was stated that we're collecting field data from two customers. How long do you estimate it will take to collect and possibly analyze this data is in a form that's useful for presentations and prospective customers? That work is definitely underway. When we look at trying to pull this data from their systems, it's not as simple as let's just run an extract and process the data. We're working with them on the on how we can gain access to that data and then be able to use it. The goal of that is to be able to use that for presentations.
Obviously, we're gonna have to protect the customer data that we're using, but at the same point in time, we will be able to use that broadly for presentations and prospective customers as well.
I think it just brings up an interesting point, Mike, is that when we spoke to one of our significant customers about going through the process with them, they were intrigued because they hadn't done it. I think that's the interesting part is that with the risk assessment tool that we have, it's actually giving people that are existing customers and potential customers a way to look at things that they haven't looked at before, weren't aware of. So it's a bit of an awakening with the tool, which I think is really exciting and really helps on the sales process. I think it changes from a bit of a push sale into a bit of a pull sale.
I always like that situation where someone's asking the questions and looking at the data and making decisions based on their information rather than information that we provide. I think it's a significant change. Let's see. We have one more there, Mike? I can just check back. What do we else do we have? I think that's it, Mike, isn't it?
I believe that is it.
Right, it's there.
Yes, it is.
Okay. One last chance for questions from anybody. Oh, did we see one come in there?
Nope, I think that wraps them up, Randy.
Great. Okay. Well, in summary, what we're seeing is the U.S. electric grid and grids globally, they're facing increased power quality challenges due to aging infrastructure, growing renewable penetration, and rising demand for electrification. We're seeing that every day. These shifts are introducing significant power quality issues, commonly referred to as dirty power, or as Mike talked about, power quality challenges where the range and voltage range is not good for building performance and device performance within the buildings. That's driving demand for SmartGATE solutions. Obviously, we've shown that this team can go through difficult times and come out ahead. There's also an outstanding power management solution that we're very pleased with. It's outperforming everything that we thought we would see in the marketplace. It's really been fascinating to see the SmartGATE perform the way it has. There is no equal.
I think we forget sometimes that we have over CAD 10 million investment in SmartGATE, and there is no competitor. We're focused on achieving the sales objectives, closely managing cash with reduced operating costs and securing sales deposits. We believe the future looks incredibly strong for Legend Power and our stakeholders. Thank you today for your support. Thank you for your interest in listening to an update. Look forward to sharing many Legend Power success stories with you on an ongoing basis. Thank you, and have a great legendary day.