My name's John Franzreb. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation of the day is Byrna Technologies, ticker BYRN. And for those not familiar with Byrna, they're a manufacturer of less lethal self-defense technologies. We are fortunate to have with us today COO John Brasier and CFO Lori Kearns. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A section, and I'll present it to management. John, Lori, thank you for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. So thanks, everyone, for your interest in Byrna. As John mentioned, we do develop, manufacture, and sell non-lethal, less lethal products for self-defense. There are a couple of trends currently when we look at society that are really tailwinds for us. So one is just general increased concern about personal safety and rising crime rates, and the second is really less tolerance towards gun violence. So Byrna is part of that solution. We're here to provide safe, reliable and effective non-lethal alternatives to traditional firearms. So when you think about, "I want to defend myself, but I don't necessarily want to take the risk of taking a life doing so," that's what we do. A little bit of company overview. So we're headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts. We have a little bit over 120 employees.
We've sold, and we'll update this on the next release, but we've sold actually over 430,000 launchers now over the last 4 years. We've sold. We sell 75% of our sales are direct to consumer, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. We also have dealer locations, and we sell, do a little bit more with law enforcement on an international basis. I'm gonna turn it over to John to go through a few more slides.
So one of the things, I think, to understand, is the opportunity, and within that opportunity, we kind of break it up into two different groups. We have non-gun owners and gun owners. So there's about 100 million gun owners in the U.S. and about 150 million non-gun owners in the U.S. We have found, through our data collection, that roughly 65% of our consumers are gun owners, okay? So if you take and look at what our lifetime value of that customer is, we estimate about $1,000. So a launcher itself costs between $370 and $470, then you buy ammo, CO2, other accessories that go along with it. So that lifespan, we're saying, is about $1,000.
So if you do the math there, and we'd be very conservative, if 5% of non-gun owners and then 10% of gun owners jump into this business and agree with us, it's about a $17 billion market over the life of our customer. So we feel there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow and create a business here. As far as our regional segments, Lori kind of spoke to that already. We are mainly focused within the U.S. We are doing a lot of expansion into Canada as of the last year. Majority of our sales are direct to consumer, so directly off our website or on Amazon. As of this year, we are expanding into Mexico. We've got a contract there that we're working through, and we've also moved into Latin America as of 2023.
So we have an award with the Córdoba police, which was 10,000 launchers, and then Buenos Aires, which was 500 launchers. The good news with any kind of law enforcement and/or agency order, there's a lot of recurring revenue there. They're buying ammunition, they're buying CO2, and majority of the time, they are buying it directly from us. This kind of walks you through our product offering. We do more than just launchers, but we do... Our main source of revenue is the launcher, which are pistol launchers. You can see in the top left. We make two models right now. One's called an LE, and one's called an SD. Then we also make rifles. So we have the TCR is the one in the middle, and then the Mission 4.
The rifles are, majority of the time, bought by law enforcement agencies for riot control, but we do have some direct consumer sales there. We also manufacture all of our own ammunition. We have multiple different types of ammunition, which I'll explain later. We also do CO2. There's 2 different sizes of CO2 that we do. We do an 8-gram and a 12-gram, and then we also do defensive sprays. So any kind of pepper spray that you're used to seeing, we do that. We're very well known within the law enforcement community for our Fox brand, and then, as of last year, we launched our own brand, Bad Guy Repellent.
We also do alarms, so simple safety alarms, something you put on your backpack or a purse or anything like that, where when you pull the rip cord on it, if there's an emergency, you'll get a strobe light that flashes, and you'll get a loud buzzer. That buzzer is about 125 decibels to create a, you know, draw attention to yourself. Then we obviously have accessories. So any products that we build, we try to make sure we have a good amount of accessories that go around that. As far as how the pistol works, the pistol works very much like a firearm pistol. You have a magazine that comes out of the grip. It holds 5 rounds. When you insert that into the grip, the round is then chambered.
When you pull the trigger, the CO2 is pierced, and that's a unique technology that we have that no one else has. So if you were to put a CO2 in our launcher, come back six months later, that CO2 has not lost any energy. So you know you're always gonna get the full amount of force that you need to defend yourself. Our, our competition does not have that technology, so we have a unique ability to have a launcher always prepped and ready. So you pull the trigger, CO2 is pierced, the round is chambered, it fires out. The round will fire about 280-340 feet per second, depending on which launcher you have. If you have the SD, it's 280. That results in about 10 joules of energy.
The LE shoots at about 330-340, and that's about 15 joules of energy. We advertise a 60 feet worth of effective distance. That really gives you the accuracy and the energy at that distance for either our kinetic round, which is a solid plastic round, which is pain compliance, or our inert or our pepper rounds, which will give you a cloud of pepper spray basically around the subject. So this kind of walks you through the different ammunitions that we have. So going left to right on the bottom are our self-defense rounds. So we make a pepper round, and then we make a Max round. The pepper round has CS and PAVA in it, which are the active ingredients. The Max round has OC and PAVA.
The Max round has CS, which is basically tear gas, so that's more of the higher level of defense that you would want. Then beyond that, we have the kinetic rounds. Kinetic rounds, as I said, is a hard piece of plastic. It's pain tolerance. So as you hit the subject, it's going to hurt, it's gonna slow them down. Eventually, they're gonna stop. Next to that, you have the inert rounds. The inert rounds are simply a white powder for training. So if you want to make sure you have the right path, you understand how to shoot, that's good for practice. Next to that, we have the Eco rounds. The Eco rounds are meant so you can shoot in your backyard and have fun. If you go to the backyard, you want to practice, you can shoot them.
You know, they're water-soluble, so after the next couple of good rains, there'll be nothing in your backyard that you have to worry about cleaning up. We do very much recommend that you practice. You can practice with the kinetic rounds or Eco rounds. We have target tents that allow you to shoot them into them, and they'll collect all your rounds as you're shooting.
This is just a look at some of our growth. One of the key metrics we look at is our average daily web sessions, and as you can see, we've had drastic increase in that over the years. Now, in 2023, we had a little stumble. Facebook, Google, Instagram decided they didn't want to run our advertising anymore because we violated the weapons policy because we looked like a gun. It's really we do a lot of education to understand that this is not a firearm while it's just as impactful, but it's non-lethal. We switched our marketing strategy, and we moved to using celebrity influencers, advertising where they're doing reads on their radio shows, on their podcasts, and we really saw that become extremely effective. We have several more influencers that we can add, and we've been adding over time.
So we use names like Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, Glenn Beck, many others. We've also had now cable TV shows, stations that are willing to show the visual ad of our product working, so Newsmax, NewsNation are a few examples of that. And as you can see, this trend remains very strong with our advertising. So looking year-over-year on Q2, our average daily web sessions were up 130%. Our average order value was up. As you can see, our D2C business is about 75% of our revenues. We had $15 million in Q2, and our revenue for Q2 was a record-breaking quarter at $20.3 million. As we look to our future growth strategy, as I said, we have many additional influencers that we can work with, and we're working with various radio stations on what works for us.
We've also increased our advertising budget, so we're spending about $1 million a month. So as we've increased the spend on that, we have greater purchasing power. We're going back to things that maybe didn't work at first, but now that we have better purchasing power, you know, we're trying some billboards and things that are effective. We just needed to get the cost down on them. One of the other things that we're working on, we currently have one retail store in Las Vegas, and we've had that open for a couple of years, and that store does about $1 million of revenue a year, and it's about a 65% contribution margin. By the end of this year, we're working to open several additional stores, one in greater Boston area.
It's likely going to be in Southern New Hampshire, which is just about 10 miles from our corporate headquarters here. In Southern California, in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nashville, we're looking at, as well as in Fort Wayne, Indiana, close to our current plant. Just looking at kind of a financial snapshot, you can see great growth in the revenue year after year, year-over-year. Our gross profit is in the 60% range, so low 60%. We're now profitable on a GAAP basis with strong adjusted EBITDA as well. On the balance sheet, our cash was just under $25 million. We had net working capital at $32 million. We have no debt. I'll let John talk about future product.
Speak a little bit about our future product. So our current product offering, as I had mentioned, for pistols, is the LE and the SD. We launched the LE last January. That product has gone very, very well. A lot of people like it. It's shooting about 330 feet per second. But one of the common things we get told by customers is the launchers are too big. They want something smaller, something easier to conceal, whether it's in a backpack, a purse, on your waistband. You know, if you're, if you're gonna be defending yourself and you want to carry it, you want something smaller. So we've heard that call. That's what we've been developing. Our plan is sometime, you know, within next year, we'll be launching the new product. We're calling it the CL right now, for Compact Launcher. It's about 30% smaller.
You can see in the image there, it's significantly narrower, which makes it easier to conceal in a waistband, and it's smaller in the height. It will be a .61 caliber versus a .68 caliber, which our current launchers are, which also means we're gonna get the majority, if not all, of the revenue from the ammunition, which .61 caliber ammunition does not exist in the marketplace right now. So that's a product we're super excited about for next year. As far as themes go, one thing we want to make sure everybody understands is we very much feel that our stock is undervalued right now. I think people want to see us be consistent, and we've been consistent now quarter after quarter. We're showing a growth strategy. We have good capacity.
Our factory ramped up from 4,500 units last September to over 18,000 units per month, as of this May. That's only on one shift. We have the ability to do two shifts. We have the ability to put more lines in. Right now we are building to a little bit of an inventory position, and we're doing that because typically the Q4 is our highest volume quarter, and we want to make sure we're not losing sales. So we have a lot of headwinds and a lot of ability to scale and grow. So we very much feel our stock is undervalued, and we're trying to make sure that we position ourselves where we're ready to take advantage of anything that may come at us.
With that, we'll open it up for questions.
Okay. Thank you, John and Lori. If anybody has a question, please enter it in the Q&A section, and I will present it to management. I'd like to start with the questioning with thoughts about your regional differences in sales. Is there anything that's noticeable in the sales profile on a regional basis?
Sure. So I think, you know, when we look at the regions, we kind of think about, you know, U.S. versus on the international. Internationally, we definitely have more, more sales in the law enforcement area than we do. You know, U.S. is much more direct to consumer. And one of the reasons we don't focus on law enforcement in the U.S. is because there are so many various agencies. So it's really not worth our dollar spent right now to go after all those small agencies, whereas internationally, you find larger police force. So you might have a countrywide or very large cities, and that's more effective for us from a marketing spend.
Got it. And a question from the audience, and you touched on this. The audience member says that he's heard the commercials on the radio many times. What are the other components of your marketing and advertising strategy?
So we do have. Like I said, we do have some television commercials. So we have television commercials that are running. If you watch, like, a Newsmax or a NewsNation, you may see those. We recently even purchased what's called remnant TV ads. So these TV ads may be running at off times, you know, middle of the night, something like that. But they're really. You know, they're costing us $0.69 for a 30-second spot. So when we look at our advertising spend, the key metric we look at is we want at least a 5 times return on our advertising spend. So for every dollar, we want 5 spent, we want $5 in sales. And if you looked at for Q2, we had $15 million in D2C sales, and this is really for D2C, and we're spending about $1 million a month on advertising.
So with that denominator being so small for something like remnant ads, we're seeing that be very effective because you don't need a lot of sales to make that worth it. We've also started some billboards, and then, you know, not only the radio, but podcasts. So, you know, we continue to look at what options we have available. We believe as the product becomes more normalized in society and people understand the product, and that it's really not a firearm, but it is a less lethal option for people, we'll have more of those channels open to us as well.
A question on the product itself. Do you have patents on your technology?
Yes, we do. The most critical patent we have, and the biggest feature we have is called Pull-to-Pierce technology, and what that means is the CO2, when it's first put into the launcher, is not pierced. It's not escaping any gas. When you pull that trigger, it will pierce the CO2, and then you use the energy. So what that basically means is I can take the launcher, I can put it in my desk drawer, and two years later, I can come back to it, and it'll have a full CO2. So I'm not gonna lose any of that energy. So when I need it to be effective, we know it'll be fully effective.
Interesting. A couple questions on the new retail rollout. What's the cost of opening a retail location? We'll start with that.
So a retail location, obviously, you have the lease, but besides the lease, it's a very small build-out cost. So it's a very small build-out cost. We're looking at about an average of $150,000 per store, and that's really for the build-out. I mean, we really just have... You have a counter, you have some display racks, and then we'll have a small range built in there as well, just because people can get in there and try it. So, you know, when people get into the store, they put it in their hand, and they try it, we have over an 80% conversion rate, and that's both in our store currently, as well as some of our dealers that have these set up as well. In fact, some of the dealers are saying they're at 90%-95% conversion if they can get the product in someone's hand. Because they really...
They shoot it, and they understand the power behind it and the efficacy of it.
What's your projected payback period for a singular store?
So for a singular store, we expect, you know, it'll take a, you know, few months to ramp up sales, but we expect each store to do about $1 million, and the contribution on that is in the 60%. So we really expect a very short payback on these stores.
Is there a total target number of retail locations you're looking for?
We're targeting to open. You know, we'd like to have four more open by the end of the year. Now, ideally, we'd like to have 100 of these stores open across the U.S., but this first set of stores is gonna help us get some data, and then we can determine how rapidly they grow, whether we want to move to a franchise model or whether we want company-owned stores. Obviously, company-owned is gonna have a higher margin profile. So that's what we're hoping to get out of this, and then I think we'll quickly roll out additional stores.
Are you gonna concentrate in certain regions, north, south, West Coast?
So, yeah, I mean, we're actually looking to try and get kind of, you know, different regions. The initial ones that we're looking at, we'll have one in Southern New Hampshire, which is just, you know, 10 miles from us here in Andover. We'll have one in Southern California, one in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nashville, and then in Indiana. So we just leased a new facility in Indiana, where we've been doing our ammo production in South Africa, and we're moving that to the US, so we'll be doing that in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where our manufacturing plant is. The front of that will be a retail store in front of the plant.
A question on the pricing. Can you talk a little bit about your ability to increase prices on either the launcher or the ammo?
Yep. As far as the launchers go, we are looking at making some upgrades for 2025, adding new features that allow us to go up in price and change things that make it a little bit more feature-rich than we currently offer. If you look at our products right now, we basically do price differentiation through models, SD versus LE, for example. But in 2025, you're going to see additional features that we add to them that allow you to have a lower price SD and then a higher price SD, a lower price LE, and a higher price LE. So you can pick which model you want within that family.
We get a lot of political questions during the conference. Here's another one: Have you noticed any change in sales trends as a result of the upcoming presidential election?
I mean, I don't think that we've noticed the trends per se, because of the presidential election. However, we understand that that could be, you know, a major impact, and we don't know exactly what's going to happen. So we have been building our inventory. We want to be prepared. You know, if there's any civil unrest, certainly people are going to be concerned about safety. So we have been increasing our inventory both for Q4 holiday sales, and we want to make sure that we have products on the shelf, due to the election. You know, I think we're just not quite sure what it's going to do. We've been increasing sales. I don't know that we can pinpoint that it's because of, you know, the election.
I'm just curious, why do you think two-thirds of your sales go to existing gun owners?
I think a big part of that is because gun owners understand the product a little bit better. They are familiar with firearms, they're familiar with projectiles and how things shoot. And the product, quite frankly, it mirrors a pistol. It looks just like a pistol, so I think it's easier for them to adapt and understand what it is.
Okay, interesting. Question from the audience, they just noticed that your projectile products have expanded with an addition of a 12-gauge round. Are additional opportunities to expand the projectile offerings as well?
Yes, correct. So one of the rounds we came up with a little over a year ago is a shotgun round that shoots a hard kinetic projectile. It's we call it a fin tail because it actually has a fin on the end of it, so it stabilizes. That is accurate out to about 100 feet. It simply uses a shotgun primer, so when you fire it, you don't need hearing protection, and it's very, very accurate. So we have been producing those and selling those as well, yes.
Can you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape?
As far as competitive landscape go within launchers, two new companies came on as far as competing with us in the launcher space in January. One was Salt Supply, the second one was SABRE. They came out with new products. They're larger products, if you will, than our pistol, so they're a little bit more cumbersome to hold. They're made overseas, they're not made here in the USA. They don't have the intellectual properties that I mentioned earlier with the Pull-to-Pierce technology. So yes, there are competitors, but we are definitely on the technology side of things, and we continue to invest. And as of next year, we've mentioned we're going to be coming out with a new launcher that's even smaller, a compact launcher.
I think that's going to keep us on the forefront of pistol launchers as they go forward.
Question from the audience about your plans for global expansion. I'll add to that. Is it really limited to law enforcement, or is there a consumer part of that that is an opportunity?
So there.
Yeah, we, we do some D2C sales, D2C sales outside of the U.S. as well, just not to the extent that we do in the U.S. John, did you want to chime in?
Yeah. So, as far as that goes, Mexico, as well as Argentina, do have commercial, you know, sales. In Mexico, that's actually part of an ad campaign for a lady that's running for office. She's saying, you know, "Buy yourself a Byrna, protect yourself," based on a female perspective in the country of Mexico. So we have partners in Mexico that are creating training programs around our product to help people understand it and use it more effectively. But commercial is an opportunity in many of these other countries.
Question about the balance sheet and your cash position, cash burn, and any needs for financing funds, and your working capital needs in the going forward.
Yeah, we're actually generating cash at this point. Now, in Q3, we even noted on our last earnings conference that, you know, we plan to use some cash, both for building our inventory as we go into Q4, as well as we said we're moving our ammo production to the U.S. So we're kind of building out our facility in Indiana for that, and a clean room, because we need the clean room to handle the chemical irritant projectiles. So while we'll use some cash in Q3, we are overall cash generating, and the first six months of the year, we generated $5 million from operating.
Okay. Well, John and Lori, I see no further questions. Any closing comments?
We appreciate.
For me.
Everyone's time and appreciate your interest in Byrna.
Okay.
Thank you very much
Thank you for presenting today. I know you have a full schedule, so, enjoy the balance of your day. Thank you very much.
Thank you, all.
Thank you.