Good afternoon, and welcome to day three of the Technology Webinar Week, brought to you by Webull Corporate Connect. Today, we will be hearing from three technology companies. First, we'll hear from the CEO of Applied Energetics, Chris Donaghy. Then we'll hear from the CEO of Innovative Eyewear, Harrison Gross, followed by the CEO of GCL Global Holdings, Sebastian Tok. All three companies will present for approximately 15 minutes, and then time permitting, there'll be a brief Q&A session. Please submit your questions on Zoom through the Q&A portal. First, please note that Webull is not involved in the preparation of any of the presentation materials, and this is not a research recommendation, solicitation, or endorsement of any kind. No investor should rely solely on the information provided in making a decision to invest. Okay, onto the webinar presentations. First, we'll hear from the CEO of Applied Energetics.
Applied Energetics specializes in optical fiber-based ultrashort pulse laser technologies for countering drones, ISR sensors, hypersonic weapons, and other applications. With 27 patents and 8 patents pending, Applied Energetics' proprietary architecture enables orders of magnitude size, weight, power reductions, a key differentiator versus traditional continuous wave laser technology. Now I'll turn it over to Chris. You can share your screen.
Thank you. As mentioned, I'm Chris Donaghey. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Applied Energetics. Applied Energetics is a directed energy technology company focused on bringing to market a new class of directed energy technology based on ultrashort pulse lasers. The overarching concept here is that sensors are everywhere on today's battlefield, primarily cameras that are used to guide drones and other objects to their targets or to provide surveillance. There's only going to be more of those over time. Therefore, a critical layer of defense, whether it's countering drones or in the broader Golden Dome application, will be the ability to take out the eyes of the things that are staring at you or want to do you harm, and that is largely what we'll be discussing over the next several minutes. First, our obligatory safe harbor statement.
We will be making some forward-looking statements in this presentation. I like to begin this presentation with our vision statement. Our vision statement is "Directed energy anywhere." This is a bold vision statement. It's an ambitious vision statement because it's never been done before. All of the lasers that you hear about being used by the U.S. military today are prototypes or experiments. There are no programs of record where the DoD is buying these lasers on a programmatic annual basis and deploying them broadly in multiple locations. Again, they're all largely prototypes or experiments. In order for this vision statement to become true, you have to have 3 boxes get checked. First of all, you have to have a widely proliferating threat that is vulnerable to the effects of directed energy systems. Small drones certainly check that box.
Second, you have to have a directed energy system that is capable of delivering high-value effects that can neutralize those targets. Continuous wave lasers, high-power microwave, as well as ultrashort pulse lasers can check that box. The box that has never been checked is the ability to produce those systems in volume with the optimal size, weight, and power that allows you to deploy those systems in any location you want, whether it's mobile platforms from naval vessels down to the small side-by-side vehicles used by special operations, to deploy bases, expeditionary bases overseas, and even fixed sites such as military bases, power plants, and the border. That is the problem that we are focused on solving, that size, weight, and power problem, and that is what we believe will enable us to achieve this vision statement.
I'm going to start this with a little bit of a vignette, first of all. What you're seeing here, I like to call this my Where's Waldo chart. This is the Lockheed 60-kilowatt high energy laser mobile test truck versus our at-scale PLAID ultrashort pulse laser system, pulsed laser air defense system. You can see that we have a substantial reduction in size, weight, and power on a relative basis. That also applies to cost as well. For the price of this Lockheed Martin vehicle, which does really cool things and may have a place on the battlefield, it's just hard to see this as a proliferated type of system. For the same amount of money that you would spend on this, you could literally buy dozens of our systems and deploy those out to the perimeter of the facility that you're trying to protect.
The next vignette that you're gonna see is related to the June 1st attack that the Ukrainians executed against the Russian air base, the Solnechnogorsk-2 air base, in Western Russia. This is an image of that air base. It's a roughly 14-kilometer perimeter around this air base. We have actually received questions from both partners as well as government customers, "Hey, if the Russians had had your technology in place, would that attack have been as successful?" Let's take a look at what it would have looked like. Here's the base. Here's what it would look like if you had deployed our system as kind of the forward perimeter of defending that system. You'd place 14 units roughly 1 kilometer apart around that air base.
All we can say publicly is that these lasers are designed to achieve a tactical range, which means 1 kilometer or beyond. When you overlay the range of the system, you can see you have a nice overlapping field of fire around that Russian air base. The probability of all of those drones making it through a quasi barrier like this is very small. If we can neutralize the optics on those small drones from 1 kilometer out, the pilot who is flying that drone has virtually 0% probability of hitting a target. If you can't see the airplanes that you're trying to strike, it's gonna be very difficult to accomplish that mission. We won't say that we would be 100% effective in this particular case, but warfare is not about being 100% effective. It's not about absolutes.
It's about percentages and dramatically reducing those percentages of success if you are defending a particular establishment. We believe that if our system had been in place, we could have had a significantly positive effect on the defense of that system and greatly reduced the destruction that occurred in that time frame. When you include the drones now, as drones are coming at you from multiple locations, a couple of things that you're gonna hear me talk about is that our laser is capable of neutralizing targets in less than a second. If I can take the eyes of these small drones out at a range of one kilometer or beyond, again, the likelihood of them striking a target is virtually 0%.
The other fortunate aspect is because we are such a quick delivery of the effect, I can afford to fire multiple lasers at individual drones to ensure neutralization of those drones before moving on to the next one. The structure of the presentation quickly, what's the problem? We just talked about the problem. What's the solution? We've talked a little bit about the solution. Why are we the guys to deliver that solution? We'll talk a little bit more about that. Ultimately, how big could the market be for these systems if we are successful? We've already talked about the problem. Sensors are everywhere, and they're only going to become more prolific over time.
Second of all, I just wanna show this one quick video because this is from the Belaya Air Base, and this is what shows you that there is a pilot behind this drone. This is not an autonomous drone that is programmed to strike a particular aircraft in a particular location. This is a pilot looking to see what is my next target. That airplane's on fire, okay? That next airplane just got hit by a drone. This drone is gonna keep flying until it finds a target that hasn't been struck yet. Again, if we can take the eyes of that drone out at a range well beyond the perimeter of the air base, the likelihood of the pilot to be able to do what you just saw in this video drops to virtually 0%.
We're going to do this by focusing on ultrashort pulse lasers. What does an ultrashort pulse laser do? Ultrashort pulse lasers take a low average power. We slice it up into many thousands of slices per second, and then we compress each one of those slices to a very small time frame. The intent here is to produce a peak power laser that is about 20 billion watts of peak power. If I can get 20 billion watts inside the optics of one of these small commercial drone cameras, it's a pretty devastating effect. It kills the camera in less than 1/30 of a second. We're also building a family of lasers that will operate at multiple wavelengths, ranging from visible cameras all the way out to long-wave infrared cameras.
When I can match the laser to the wavelength of the sensor, there is no countermeasure. Our pulses are so short and such high intensity that there's no way to stop it from creating the effect on the camera system that it's targeting. The last aspect of this is we are using a new type of architecture that is based on optical fiber, and that allows us a couple of things. Once we've developed the recipe for what that system looks like, it makes it easy to manufacture, and it's a repeatable process. Because it's based on optical fiber, it's relatively straightforward to ruggedize, and it also is what gives us the small size, weight, and power footprint of the system that we're able to deliver.
The effects here, so at longer ranges or lower energies, you initially jam the sensor so that it can no longer create an image of what it's trying to see. The laser is saturating the sensor in it, and it's blinded, but not permanently. If you increase the energy on the target, you start to do damage. Ultimately, you exceed a threshold where you're ablating the materials on the sensor itself, and the sensor will fail to operate, and it's essentially been destroyed. Again, and we do this effect all the time. We've been proving that we can kill cameras in our research laboratory almost from day one. The real innovation here is the footprint of the system that we expect to deliver this. You can see this system is roughly the size of two shoe boxes.
It weighs just under 60 pounds, and it uses about the same amount of energy from the wall as your garage door opener. A 1,000 watts of power is a very low-power system, certainly relative to the continuous wave lasers that are being used in those prototypes and experiments that I was talking about earlier. Here's an example. This is the LOCUST laser that's produced by, was produced by a company that was called BlueHalo, now part of AV. It's a 20-kilowatt laser, but the main thing to understand here is that laser is 60 times the size of our system by volume. It weighs thousands of pounds. It's gonna use about 100,000 watts of power compared to our 1-kilowatt system. The system we're bringing to market has substantial advantages from a size, weight, and power perspective.
It also will have an advantage from a cost perspective, and it is what will allow you to have this distributed or proliferated architecture that allows you to buy many of these things and place them as that outer perimeter of capability. Why are we the guys to do this? We've been doing ultrashort pulse lasers for a long time. As mentioned, 27 awarded patents.
We actually have 11 applications that are held under government secrecy orders, meaning the content of those patent application is so sensitive that the government doesn't even want those patents published on their website, so they're held in reserve by a specific portion of the Patent and Trademark Office where they hold things like this that they don't want disclosed to the public. We continue to develop new patent, patented approaches we have with 8 additional patents pending. We've been doing this for a while. Our chief scientist and Applied Energetics built a 5 terawatt ultrashort pulse laser back in the mid-2000s that demonstrated that you could affect sensitive electronics at pretty long ranges over multiple types of environments.
We have had small, three relatively small contracts that were simply prove to us that an ultrashort pulse laser can deliver the effect that you're talking about. One for the Marine Corps for counter ISR, basically counter drone. One for the Army for countering surface-to-air heat-seeking missiles. One for the Navy that we can't really talk about the specifics of that. Obviously, the Navy has big platforms that they would like to defend. My priority since becoming CEO in November 2024, it's all about demonstrating this capability in our battle lab at medium range to begin with and ultimately long range. Doing demonstrations, getting lasers into the battle lab by the middle of the year, integrating with a third-party laser platform that you'll see on the next slide, increasing the staffing around engineering and prototype development.
What you're seeing on the right-hand side, those top right boxes are our first prototype boxes that we will be putting the laser into. The bottom is a rendering of what the final system will look like. Basically, the way this will work is you'll have multiple of these types of boxes that you just connect together to create the laser that you then put into a larger enclosure to accomplish the mission. The Cord system itself, it's all about the things that we don't do. We've been focused on the laser. They provide us all the software. It gives us the ability to understand how to integrate our laser into somebody else's system. This is obviously not the footprint we're looking for, but it has the things that we don't have, mainly in the form of the software.
We've talked a little bit about our progress. You see the three contracts that we've had in the past. We recently added a fourth contract with Rochester. The thing to understand about those four contracts is the power of each one of those lasers gets higher as you move from left to right, and that trend is going to continue into future applications, as well. We also expect to see spin-out capabilities in the field of biomedical research, as well as advanced manufacturing. We expect these to be large addressable markets, $32 billion anticipated by 2033 for directed energy, $12 billion by 2032 for counter-UAS.
The one point I would make on this top left data point, the $32 billion, in my opinion, you don't really see that kind of number until someone solves the size, weight, and power problem that enables the DoD to start inserting this kind of capability into existing programs of record or awarding new programs of record where they're buying these things on an annual basis. What that looks like from a practical standpoint is if we were to see our system deployed on a vehicle such as the DoD's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, it's a little bit up in the air on how many of these things are going to be ultimately produced because of some changes by the recent administration. This model was put together assuming 40,000 vehicles.
If you assume 5% penetration of that platform, it would imply 2,000 units to be produced. This is the typical production ramp that you see for a DoD program of record. We're sort of assuming here that our price point is going to be about $1 million a copy, producing 250 units a year. Ultimately, the blue bars here, the production revenue, represents about $2 billion of revenue over time. The gray bars are the support and sustainment of those systems over time through about the 25th year. The total opportunity for one program of record for one platform in this particular case could be as much as $4 billion.
The business is all about going and finding another one of those things and another one of these things and stacking these programs on top of each other over time for different applications, and different platforms, achieving different types of purposes. My last slide here is one little blurb on Golden Dome for America. Again, we believe a core pillar of Golden Dome is going to be taking out the eyes of the things that are staring at you at any altitude. If you want to do that, the ultrashort pulse laser is really the only viable concept to make that happen.
Because of our size, weight, and power advantage, because of the sub-second engagement time required to deliver the effect, because of our ability to operate across different wavelengths, because of the low average power, which means we have a very low thermal signature, meaning we're not gonna stick out if an infrared camera is looking for our system. These are all things that combine together to really make an ultrashort pulse laser the ideal platform to use in this counter-electro-optic pillar that we expect to see as part of Golden Dome. That's my last slide. I will switch over to the Q&A, and I will try to get through as many of these as I can. Will your company also be using steadily growing augmented reality technology within your current or future products?
I'm not exactly sure about augmented reality, but if you go back to that slide with the overlapping fields of fire, it's pretty clear that we are going to have to be connected to a larger infrastructure. Again, we don't expect to be the single effector that is used to counter small drones. We expect to tie into a layered defense system where the software layer is going to be provided by another company that has the AI built in. When a sensor tells it, "Hey, there are drones 4 kilometers out, and they're coming from these different directions," start spinning up these lasers to be ready to counter those. The AI will then say, "Here's the drone I want you to shoot first.
Here are the multiple lasers that I want you to fire against that particular drone, and then here's the next drone to go after that. There's a question. Any plans of up-listing? The way to think about Applied Energetics in the traditional venture capital terminology, you should think of Applied Energetics as a post-Series A startup. We've raised about $30 million over the last 6 years. We have 25-30 employees. That's very typical of a defense tech, hard tech startup. We do plan to up-list to a national market sometime over the next 12 months or so. We're working toward that. Let's see, what's the next question? What is the most significant near-term application or product that investors should be looking for?
It's going to be the counter-drone system. We are very close to having that technology moved into the battle lab to be able to do on-demand demonstrations of that platform. That again is one of my highest priorities. When a partner calls, when a customer calls, when a politician calls and they say, "Hey, I wanna come see this work against multiple targets," we have the ability on very short notice to be able to spin up the lasers to be able to do a multi-shot demonstration for that particular audience as quickly as possible. We have already taken our first multi-target test shots. We will be doing a lot more of those in volume once we get past a series of deadlines that we have set for July 1st.
The biggest hurdle to commercialization, as I mentioned, we have been focused on the laser source itself, but we have to get to a full system. We will likely partner with a third party who will produce the gimbal that sits on top to do beam delivery. We will likely partner with some outside parties as well as doing some of our own software development. Right now it's about integration, but the laser itself is very, very close to being ready. We're very excited about where we are. I can tell you that the energy level of my team is at the highest level I've seen it since I've been here, and I've been here for about three years.
The last question is, "Who is your competition?" There is no competition for ultrashort pulse lasers. There have been 3 contracts awarded by DoD for the use of ultrashort pulse lasers as an effector to defeat targets on a battlefield, and we've won all 3 of those. The competition has been for budget. If you look at the size of our contracts, you know, they haven't been that significant. That's why we are taking more of a defense product approach to this. We're not gonna wait for the DoD to do this and hold our hand out, waiting for them to give us the next round of capital.
We are gonna take control of our own destiny, like we've been doing, raising outside capital to develop the product, to produce it as a system that we can sell on commercial terms. The continuous wave laser guys, they are the ones who have cornered all of the DoD market for directed energy. We want to change that, and the way we're gonna change that is by producing a system that is ready to go, and ready to be demonstrated, and ready to be bought. With that, I'll thank you for your time. I appreciate it, and certainly if you have any follow-up questions, you can go to our website, and submit questions, through either our investor relations contact or through the info email address.
Chris, thank you so much for your time. For the webinar participants, please remember that you can go to Applied Energetics' Corporate Connect service page on the app for more updates. Next, we will hear from Harrison Gross, CEO of Innovative Eyewear, doing business as Lucyd, which develops and sells cutting-edge smart eyeglasses and sunglasses, operating under the Lucyd and Lucyd Lyte brands, which are designed to allow customers to remain connected to their digital lives while also offering prescription eyewear and sun protection. Before I pass it off to Harrison, again, please note that Webull is not involved in the preparation of any of the presentation materials, and this is not a research recommendation, a solicitation, or endorsement of any kind. No investor should rely solely on the information provided in making a decision to invest. Now I'd like to introduce Harrison Gross.
The floor is yours.
Hey, thanks so much. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to share our mission to upgrade the world's eyewear with you all. What we do is we add useful and functional tech features to prescription-ready eyewear. We're making the world's most important wearable better by allowing you to use it to stay safely and seamlessly connected to your digital life. We live at the intersection of prescription, tech, and fashion. We really bring these three things together with our product. The U.S. market for traditional eyewear is actually quite large. It's about a $64 billion annual market, and our goal is to convert a portion of that market into smart eyewear users. We've been developing smart eyewear actually since before 2019.
We have over 100 years of optical experience in the company, and we have dozens of years of engineering experience as well on our team. That has resulted in smart glasses that look and feel more like normal eyewear. For example, if I didn't tell you that the glasses I'm wearing right now were smart glasses, you probably wouldn't realize it. That's part of our brand promise to really provide the next evolutionary leap in eyeglasses, sunglasses, and other forms of eyewear. We don't see smart glasses as a different type of consumer electronic. We see it as the next step in the evolution of eyeglasses and sunglasses that we wear every day.
We have a number of retail partners. We're actually the only smart glasses that Dick's Sporting Goods sells. We've been selling through bestbuy.com and target.com for a few years now. We're in about 400 eyewear stores around the U.S. and Canada, and it's growing pretty quickly as we introduce more types of smart eyewear to meet the needs of different users. We've also developed a really strong patent portfolio. We have over 110 patents and applications. Many of these are global PCT patents, some of them are U.S. patents. We really believe in the importance of building a strong IP position in the smart glass landscape to ensure our ability to operate freely in this category.
One thing that's really interesting about smart eyewear is that it's very well-positioned to be sort of the remote control for this IoT future that we're heading into. We're heading into this world where all of our devices are gonna be connected by AI, and the easiest way to communicate with AI is voice control. Our voices have evolved over millions of years. It's the most natural, effortless way we have to communicate, not just with other people, but also with digital systems. Smart glasses are really well-positioned to take advantage of voice-controlled systems because of their proximity to your senses, to your hearing, and your mouth.
Because of smart eyewear's unique position on the face, it's very well-positioned to be kind of the center of this IoT landscape that's emerging, where you can use your smart glasses as your remote for your car, your smart home, for all of these different functionalities that we're going to be performing through AI, now and in the near future. It can all be made easier through our glasses, which in an easy way to imagine them, it's as simple as headphones and glasses in one, but it's also sort of a device and operating system agnostic interface layer that can be used to enhance and improve access to basically any digital system.
Our glasses connect using Bluetooth to basically any other device, smartwatch, phone, PC, and allows you to control that device through voice assistant and through some custom touch controls and other methods that we've developed through the eyewear. One thing that we do that's very different from other companies producing smart glasses is that we've partnered with some major fashion brands to introduce a really varied offering to meet the needs of different consumers. With Reebok, as you might imagine, we're producing some sport frames. Eddie Bauer is more of a high-end luxury frame for older male audiences. Nautica is kind of a general middle-of-the-road collection. And then our Lucyd brand, we usually use to speak more to the early adopters and the tech-forward consumer.
This is something that we're doing again to make smart eyewear more like regular eyewear. Having that variety is so important, not just in style and brands, but also in sizes and shapes. There's a reason when you go into LensCrafters, you see hundreds and hundreds of frames on the wall, and that's because eyewear is such a specific accessory to the user. This has actually been one of the biggest hurdles to mass market adoption of smart eyewear. Most companies that have historically produced smart glasses produce one to two SKUs. Usually, it's just black. Usually, it's just sized for adult men. This is something that we've addressed to really help democratize access to smart eyewear and make it more useful, enjoyable for the average consumer, excuse me.
This was our first co-branded collection with Nautica, came out about a year and a half ago, and it's been also really helpful for our conversations with major big box retailers to see, our technology underneath very familiar brands. In the case of Nautica, actually, they already have a big following in regular eyewear too. We're able to reach, you know, these millions of people that are already wearing Nautica glasses with their same brand that they already know and love, but with the addition of all these useful tech features, being able to talk to Siri, translations, access ChatGPT through our custom integration, and all these other great features that our glasses provide. This was our Eddie Bauer collection. One thing really cool about this one is we actually introduced the first-ever rimless smart glass.
This had never existed on the market before, and just shows how we're kind of pushing forward on the design edge, and really making our glasses super attractive and matching the trends in the traditional eyewear landscape. 'Cause surprise, things that sell well in regular eyewear also do well in smart eyewear. Here's some of the accessories that the Eddie Bauer one comes with. This is our cordless charging cradle. This was the first cordless charging dock ever developed for smart eyewear. It makes it really easy to charge our glasses, just like when you put your glasses on your nightstand when you go to bed. That's all you have to do to charge our eyewear. One other thing that sets us apart from other companies making smart glasses is we're not just making the glasses.
We've developed an entire retail and user ecosystem around them that includes some of the most sophisticated displays in the entire optical landscape, along with a really expansive app that we use to drop in new features every couple of months, to keep the glasses updated and fresh. Over here you see our Android. This is our Reebok-branded Android display. This is a 13-inch Android tablet fully integrated in the display that allows the user to perform seamless music demos on the glasses here. This pair of glasses is actually kept charged by the display. All of this was custom developed, and no other smart glass product has anything like this.
This really helps with our conversations with retailers and help getting traditional optical retailers to start adopting smart eyewear, which is so important because the optical market is much, much bigger than the wearables and AI device market. That's really the market that we attack and that we're going after and delivering solutions for first and foremost, while we're also building our direct-to-consumer business over the last 5 or 6 years. We also have here on the right. This is a really impressive unit. This is a fully interactive 32-inch Android display that allows virtual try-on of every SKU in our catalog. A store can put this in. They don't even have to stock our products.
They can just put in the display with the 1 demo unit here, and then they can stock products at will as consumers order them through the kiosk or through a clerk in the store. We have a lot of really creative solutions that make bringing on our products super easy for retailers and super engaging for consumers to learn about and try their first smart glasses. If you've ever been in a retail store in the last 5 years, you know it's impossible to get help. We do everything we can to really automate the consumer education process. Okay, this product is really exciting. This came out in October of last year. This is our first smart safety glass. There are 4 major categories of eyewear: eyeglasses, sunglasses, safety glasses, and sport glasses.
As of 2025, we've introduced market-leading smart products for all four of those categories. This is our smart safety glass. It's $129. It's super affordable. It comes with auto-tinting lenses. It comes with a really groundbreaking walkie-talkie feature we created for people working on job sites and in warehouses. This has been our fastest-selling product ever. We're selling over 1,000 units a month. Just came out. It's been doing really well. We're constantly running out of it, and we're already introducing five new variants with different lens colors and different sizes, and even a foam gasket for people that are doing welding and other things where sparks flying.
This product just really has worked so well, because we think it addresses a very specific user super directly with use cases and utilities that just completely match with their lifestyle. It's much easier to market these more niche smart glasses, again, because they have this very specific user base that they're trying to speak to. It's a little bit harder with the general use optical smart glasses, where you have to kind of help the customer imagine integrating this into their lifestyle. With this, it's much more obvious. You no longer need a walkie-talkie. You no longer need regular safety glasses or a handheld communication device. It's all built into your safety eyewear, and it's fully prescription adaptable. We ship it direct to consumer with prescription. It was even covered on Colbert.
Let me play this funny clip for you.
Next up on the See Gazey, Innovative Eyewear has announced the first walkie-talkie feature for smart eyewear. This is perfect for anyone who's ever thought, "I wish people could yell into my eyes.
That's just a funny little press hit we got on the safety glasses right after they came out. Yeah, it's just been a very exciting product, and it's really meeting this unmet market need for enhanced safety eyewear. You know, safety glasses are different because people that wear safety glasses, they have to wear them. It's not like an option. It's not like you can wear contacts instead. You actually have to wear these glasses all day, every day. Now our product, for the first time, allows those millions and millions of users to enjoy podcasts safely with open-ear audio, to listen to music while they're working, and to no longer need an actual handheld communication device. They can just use the walkie feature right on the glasses.
You can join and leave walkie channels with custom Siri commands that we developed. It's super easy, it's totally hands-free, and it's really a revolutionary product for anyone in a kind of a blue-collar workforce. This product, Lucyd Lyte, this is our flagship line. This is just our standard optical smart frames. We've been producing these since 2021. This is really the form factor that helped the company take off in a big way, and start converting traditional glasses customers to smart eyewear users. Here are some of our other press hits that we've gotten in the last couple of years. One thing that was really cool, we got a full feature story in Women's Wear Daily.
That was really interesting 'cause we get covered in, like, in tech and business world all the time, but to be covered in the fashion press was really cool and shows that the fashion world is starting to wake up to tech-infused apparel products like ours, which is a really good sign for, you know, some of the bigger fashion retailers, starting to work with us. We've also been rated best GPT eyewear by PCMag, best variety in smart eyewear by Screen Rant, featured in BuzzFeed, Today Show. We get Forbes. We've had a couple Forbes articles on us. We're just all over the news whenever we come out with new products, that are bringing together these really beloved fashion brands and our core technology.
One thing that was really covered very heavily, and probably the biggest run on the stock in our history, was when we announced our ChatGPT feature. Six months after ChatGPT came out, we immediately were able to launch an integration for Siri and Bixby that allows you to speak to ChatGPT through our eyewear. This was actually the first voice interface for ChatGPT before OpenAI's app even came out. We immediately recognized the value of leveraging the world's most powerful AI into our platform, and we made it happen, and a number of our customers come to us just for that feature. Just really shows, you know, we're on top of things, and we're really elevating our product and making sure that it's compatible with the latest computing platforms and AI platforms. This was also really cool.
Just about 2-3 weeks ago, we got featured on the Today Show. Al Roker put on our glasses. Let's check it out.
Our talking tech this morning with some of the coolest new gadgets to get you ready for the long, hot summers. Here to help us is the coolest tech expert on the planet, Katie Linendoll. As always, you just scan the QR code to shop along with us. Katie, good to see you.
Hey.
How are you?
Good to see you guys. Hi.
All right, our glasses are getting a tech upgrade.
They are getting a tech upgrade. Let's start with this. I'm so excited about these gadgets, and these look like regular glasses, but they're actually smart glasses and smart sunglasses. They're from a company called Lucyd, and I discovered these at a really cool tech event called eMerge Americas.
I like these.
They're stylish.
They are.
They stopped me in my tracks because they're not only beautiful, and there's so many different styles, but it's all about the functionality. Inside here.
What did they do?
... they're speakers.
Uh-huh.
They make and take calls hands-free.
Oh, wow.
but you can also listen to your music. These are yours, Al.
You can go see.
Let's see you look.
You wanna take the blue pill or the red pill?
That was a really nice organic hit we got. I met Katie, the lady in the middle, at the eMerge conference here in Miami. She loved the glasses. She ended up putting them on broadcast. Just really nice coverage there. We're seeing a really great response to our smart eyewear, I think because of the style aspect and the fact that they really do look fashionable and like normal eyewear, and that really helps, I think, demystify it and make it easier for traditional eyewear users to make the switch to smart eyewear. A couple of our other industry firsts. These are all innovations that we developed first here at our company and brought to the smart eyewear landscape.
We were actually the first company ever to ship prescription-fitted smart glasses direct to consumer. That was actually all the way back in 2018. We were really, like, the first guys to really put a prescription lab behind these products and really make it into normal optical eyewear. We developed some of the first smart glasses for women and youth, first cordless charger, first titanium smart eyewear, first smart glasses that weighed an ounce. We have an upcoming unit that actually weighs less than an ounce. Really exciting stuff. This is a prototype of that unit. This is an ultra light smart glass that's literally the same dimensions as a regular pair of glasses, just to show you some of the exciting stuff that's coming and how much more normal smart eyewear is gonna look in the years to come.
We have the longest battery life of any smart eyewear on the market. We developed some of the first social applications specifically for smart eyewear, first voice interface for ChatGPT, first generative AI eyewear runway. We've just done a lot of cool things to make smart eyewear, you know, to really build the concept of this product in the minds of consumers. Here's a look at our Reebok collection, which we just launched in April. This is our best product yet in my view. But perhaps besides the safety glasses, which has just been such a runaway hit. The Reebok products retail for $199. They have really strong audio. These were actually developed with a team of ex-Bose engineers that worked on the Bose audio glasses a couple of years ago.
They're now working with us under consultancy to improve the audio of all of our products and really make them best in class. This is obviously geared towards that sportier market, and it's perfect for cyclists and runners because they can listen to music, and they can communicate with other people that they're out with, within an open ear format and with polarized eye protection. It's a really nice combo of features that runners and cyclists really look for when they're out adventuring. We bring all of that into this frame in just one really sleek product that pairs up with any Bluetooth device. The level and the quality of the audio on this collection is really head and shoulders above everything else we've produced to date.
Here's an example of one of the frames, just very sleek and stylish looking. Looks very sporty, just like any designer sport frame, but it has all these awesome smart features packed into it. I wanted to leave some time for questions, so I'm just gonna go into just a couple final key points. What I always compare smart eyewear and smart eyewear market to is smartwatches. They're both wearable devices with extremely accepted form factors that have been around for half a millennium and are just now getting upgraded with new technology. Smartwatches, it's really interesting. In 2015, the Apple Watch came out, and just 5 years later, the entire market flipped, and now more smartwatches are sold worldwide than regular watches as of about 2020.
It's very easy for us to envision that same flip coming for eyewear and that $64 billion-$68 billion annual eyewear market. One day that will be a smart eyewear market as users start to realize how much more value and utility and access to information that they can get out of having smart eyewear. With the ChatGPT integration, it's really like having a second brain in your glasses. It's really exciting stuff, and it's a major upgrade to eyeglasses. That's essentially our story. Excited to take any questions, and I look forward to upgrading your eyewear. Okay, first question. Longtime consumer of your products, how do you plan to balance innovation with affordability to continue to appeal to a broad customer base while remaining cutting edge?
This is actually something that is really answered, I think, by economies of scale. For our size company, I think today we're a $12 million market cap intraday. It's really. We're still producing these things in what I would call boutique quantities, 2,000 units of each style at a time. Once we're at a stage where we're really producing, you know, 50, 100,000 units at a time, the economies of scale are going to greatly improve and further enhance our margins. Also along that line, we've had incredible improvement to our gross margins year-over-year. Q1 results, we got up to a 49% gross margin from basically break even, like a 0% margin last year.
That is largely in thanks to the safety glasses, the wrap style glasses. The safety glasses and the Reebok glasses are actually a little bit cheaper to make than the traditional optical frames, because they only use one battery, and one PCB board. Whereas the optical frames are true wireless, so they have a complete audio system in each temple. Because of that, the wrap glasses are about 30%-40% cheaper to produce, and the introduction of these much higher margin products has really benefited the company. How would you apply this product to mass production for individual organizations? Let's say if a company wants 1,000 glasses for ease of use. This is something that we are starting to do now.
We're starting to have construction companies, contractors, job sites contact us being like, "Hey, we've been looking for a connectivity solution like this." We're, you know, we're tired of using walkie-talkies in 2025. And our Lucid Armor safety glasses are a perfect solution basically for any workforce. They're prescription adaptable. They have this built-in walkie-talkie feature and you're able to communicate completely through Siri, you're able to join and leave these walkie channels completely hands-free. This is like a game changer in terms of like productivity and safety for anyone that's, you know, working with power tools and other things like that. They no longer need to pull out their phone basically for any reason. I think we're at time, I'm gonna have to cut it there.
Thank you so much, Harrison. We really appreciate your time. Just remember that you can head over to Innovative Eyewear Corporate Connect service page on the app for more updates. Now we will hear from the CEO of GCL Global Holdings, Sebastian Toke. GCL unites people through immersive games and entertainment experiences, enabling creators to deliver engaging content and fun gameplay experience to gaming communities worldwide with a strategic focus on the rapidly expanding Asian gaming market. Before I pass it off, again, please note that Webull is not involved in the preparation of any of the presentation materials, and this is not a research recommendation, solicitation, or endorsement of any kind. No investor should rely solely on the information provided in making a decision. Now I'd like to introduce Sebastian, the CEO of GCL. You can share your screen now.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for taking the time and joining this conference. Let me just share my screen right now and okay, we should be good to go. One second. Let me just have this at the full screen mode. In short, GCL is a video gaming company. For those of you who have played games, I think you would resonate with a lot of the business and the progress that we've been developing over the last few years. For the non-gamers on the call, I would just like to spend a few minutes just to kind of share with you how a gaming company like us would make money via the various verticals. On the left-hand side of the screen, you would see the physical products.
If you go to the shopping mall, if you go into GameStop, for example, and you look at the physical products, that is what we would call the physical games, and that's distribution in nature. Of course, as digitalization took over, you would have the digital version of the physical products, and gamers can then buy the digital activation keys, which looks like a string of alphanumeric numbers on screen, and this is the digital version of a physical product. You would buy a digital key primarily to activate it on Steam so that you can do direct consumer downloads, or you download the game after you activate the key as well.
In this part of the business, which is on the Steam platform, which is almost the monopolist, which is pretty much the monopolistic platform for PC game downloads today. Steam direct consumer downloads is only for the game publishers and game developers. It's important for this ground, or at least the fundamental information to be shared because GCL today exists as an ecosystem, and our business spans across physical distribution, digital distribution, game publishing and game development as well. That being said, let me just introduce to you our corporate history. The company has been around for 18 years right now. We started the business in 2007, and on screen you would see some of the biggest gaming IP, such as Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk, Witcher and whatnot.
We work with some of the biggest game studios and publishers, both in U.S., Europe and Asia as well. Some of the biggest publishers that you see on screen, Sega is a shareholder, and Sega currently holds about 6-7% of shareholding within the group still today. Primarily, the business today, it's pretty much global in nature. We're across nine countries. We're one of the biggest wholesale game distributor in Asia, including China markets, and our retail touchpoints spans across 2,100 online and offline retail points. As the business have expanded over these few years, think of us as a full suite ecosystem. Now, what do I mean by that? We're right at the forefront of game development, which is highlighted on the left pillar here.
Our branding, which is 4Divinity, this is our wholly owned subsidiary, primarily focused on IP development and game publishing. At the same time, we've invested into third-party game studios. Today within GCL, we've got a belt of studios, game studios, both via investment and our wholly owned subsidiary, where we are creating IPs for pretty much over the next few years, you'll see a string of IPs coming up from this part of the business. For game publishing, it's a bit more technical. Without going too deep into the business, game publishing predominantly is quite similar to investments. As a game publisher, you would deploy capital to up-and-coming game IPs or game studio, and you would deploy capital for the game to be finished, and once it's launched, as a game publisher, you would have revenue share.
Of course, there are a lot of technical works that a game publisher would do, think of it as an investment, an IP investment business. For game distribution, as I've shared with you in the earlier screen, we're one of the biggest wholesale distributor for physical products and for digital keys in this region. 2024 really marked the milestone where the business has gone global as well. Last but not least, as a full suite ecosystem, we've got some peripheral businesses such as marketing and media, consumer electronics and hardware to kind of complement and supplement the entire ecosystem strategy. The call to fame really is over the last 18 years, we've been the prime partner for some of the biggest studios in the world in handling the game distribution for their IP in Asian markets, exclusively.
Well, we have handled some of the biggest titles that you might have heard of, such as Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk, Witcher, and we've been managing the distribution rights for all these IP for many, many years. The pipeline since then has grown, and it's actually quite an exciting time to be a gamer because the pipeline of IP over the next 12 to 24 months is looking to be quite robust. When you invest into GCL, the investment strategy is not really taking a bet on one singular IP. Investing into GCL is not hoping that one IP within the group would do well or two IPs. Within the entire ecosystem today, we are distributing more than 8,000 game titles from physical units to digital keys to games that we're publishing and of course, IPs that we're developing.
Think of us as a conduit to the gaming industry, where as long as the gaming industry continues to grow and it continues to be vibrant, our game library continues to organically grow as well. On screen you see a platform which is 2game.com. It is a platform that we hold a majority stake in. User base for this platform is almost 1 million, and it's a platform that we use to distribute digital keys across the world as well. Just a quick highlight for some of you that have played one of the biggest game last year, which is Black Myth: Wukong. Black Myth, without too much information sharing, it's already won so many accolades in the gaming industry. It broke a lot of world records in the gaming industry itself.
It broke $1 billion in global sales within the first month. For a title such as Black Myth, for it to be such a massive title for last year, the biggest milestone for GCL was that we were designated the exclusive physical publisher for this title globally. Every single physical copy that you would have bought in U.S., Europe, Middle East, it all came from our channels. If you buy any single copy today and you turn it to the back, you'll see the logo here, which is 4Divinity, our publishing arm. This became a milestone for us because we were recognized as the core partner in bringing forth a true Triple-A content out from Asia to global markets as well. It became a door opener for us for many upcoming titles as well.
Now, just to further elaborate how the ecosystem strategy works. When you look at game distribution, which is the core of the business that's been in existence for 18 years, to the right game distribution, retail platform, gaming hardware, these would be seen as the stable part of the business, which we would deem the downstream side of the business. Margins are usually very stable. The business is stable as well. You take finished products, you're selling to the channel, it's a very stable part of the business. 3 years ago, we went into the upstream side of the business. We went into game publishing, started investing into game IP, we formulated a game development planning within 4Divinity as well, while we established investment strategies into third-party studios as well. Today it's a very simple strategy. We are an IP developer.
We have got a portfolio of studios that we've invested in. We have published a string of titles. We've published 9 titles to date. We continue to have publishing titles that we're amalgamating and we're speaking to over the next few years as well. From IP development all the way to retail channels, this whole ecosystem strategy allows us to capture gaming deals, be it upstream or the downstream side of the business. Of course, with an ecosystem, we're sitting on a huge trough of data, sales data especially over the last 18 years, that enables us to see the pipeline of games that's coming forth to the market over the next 12 to 24 months.
It allows us to make better decisions when we are going out there to look for games to publish or at least when we're creating our own IP, the narrative of the IP has to fit the ever-changing consumer demand as well. Having that ecosystem really helps future-proof the business as well. Now, the current financial year that we're on, and for our financial year it starts 1st of April and it ends 31st of March. The current financial year that we're on is FY 2026. As I've mentioned in the earlier part of the presentation, it's truly an exciting part or at least an exciting moment in time to be a gamer or at least be in the gaming industry. Because why?
There are 4 key growth drivers that's applicable to us, and I'll share with you in detail over the next few slides. Number 1, the market will see a string of nice AAA content that's being released. Number 2, Switch 2 has been announced as well. I think depending on which region that you're in, Switch 2 should be in your retail stores at this point of time. Number 3, we have announced a strategic acquisition in a company called Ban Leong Technologies, which is a Singapore-listed company. Number 4, of course, to introduce to you a title that we've invested in, which is Showa American Story. Just really quickly, over the next 12 months, you're gonna see a string of titles that has been announced and some of it has been released for Switch 2 as well.
You will see big titles such as Elden Ring, Nightreign, Hogwarts, Cyberpunk being released on Switch 2. All these titles are massive multi-billion dollar franchises, and we've been distributing all these titles for years. On the Switch 2 new console as well, we retain the distribution rights for all these titles, and the numbers are looking very healthy at this point of time. Of course, in the latter part of this year and going into next year, if you're a gamer, you would be excited over the likes of Borderlands 4 and of course GTA 6. If the May timeline were to be kept, that would be an exciting time as well. We're praying that, you know, there's not gonna be further delays to it, but who knows?
Over the next 12 months, it's truly gonna be an exciting time to be a gamer 'cause there will be massive IPs that's gonna be released. Of course, with Switch 2, it's a big contribution to the video gaming industry as a whole. Us being one of the bigger entity or at least the bigger ecosystem out from Asia, this will be a contributing factor to our growth over the next few years as well. Reason being, if you look at just the global install base for Switch versus PlayStation, Switch 1 right now has a global install base three times of PlayStation, which means that Switch 2 sales could be a very long tail business.
As more and more titles are released which are native for Nintendo Switch 2 and are only functional on Switch 2, then the native Switch 1 users will find themselves upgrading to Switch 2 as well. The business for GCL all these years have been in game sales, right? We're in gaming software and we're in game sales. For the first time ever with the acquisition of Ban Leong, which I'll elaborate in the next few slides. We're finally moving ahead with getting a piece of the pie for the video gaming console secondary market sales. This is gonna be an exciting moment for us. Now, just to share with you why the acquisition for Ban Leong is truly strategic for us. As I've mentioned, over the 18 years of GCL's history, we've always been in software and IP.
With this acquisition for Ban Leong, Ban Leong represents a company that's been in existence for more than 30 years in the market, and they're primarily in consumer electronics and gaming hardware. With the acquisition of Ban Leong, GCL as an ecosystem is truly a software and a hardware group today. It brings about many new value drivers, a lot of collaboration, IP collaboration, bundling. You know, there's a lot of value drivers with this, acquisition as well. When you look at Ban Leong's business as it is, they represent a big chunk of the consumer brands and the gaming hardware brands that are entering Southeast Asia. Familiar brands such as ASUS, Nvidia, Razer, MSI, LG.
As a business, Ban Leong has been benefiting over the last few years from the growth of not just AI companies that's been sprouting up in Asia, but just the growth in demand for consumer electronics. As a group, Ban Leong has got a huge, or at least a strong allocation for some of the highest selling SKU in the consumer hardware space, for example, graphic cards. When AI companies are sprouting over the last few years, graphical processing cards were highly in demand. Graphic cards were selling well, PC, high-powered PC, gamings, gaming laptops, servers, keyboards, mouse, everything in between. The business has been organically going well. Of course, with the acquisition, it allows us to enter into the consumer electronics market.
By bringing the IP that we have within the group, it allows for IP collaboration and more importantly, new geographical markets as well. When we look at the geographical markets that GCL is in today, we're across nine territories in the world, and the business has truly gone past Asia. We've expanded into U.K. and Brazil. Just out of the physical presence that we have in Asia itself, we're in nine territories, and Ban Leong is in three territories. Just through the acquisition itself, it unlocks a whole new growth driver in new geographical markets as well. Moving on to the last point, I would like to just quickly take a few minutes to just kind of introduce to you the studio that we've invested in.
You would have seen an announcement that we made in February that we invested into a studio called Netcom Inc, where we hold 20% shares, and this is primarily for the IP called Showa American Story. Now, I'm truly excited to introduce this IP, but in the essence of time, I urge you to kind of watch the trailer. If you go on YouTube or if you go on any of the social media platforms and you type Showa American Story, you should be able to see the IP. This IP, which we've released the second trailer last November, has been very well received. We're very blessed that it really became quite viral. A lot of interesting engagement coming from game influencers like Asmongold. You see a lot of engagement and positive feedback coming from the IP as well.
When we released the second trailer, it had massive views over a month where it reached 275 million views worldwide. It was trending number one on the Asian platform, Bilibili, and there were really high number of view counts and engagement across all markets as well. This IP is something that we're really constructive and bullish on. Just to kind of share with you how the media has reacted to the trailer. We all knew that when Black Myth: Wukong was launched last year and when it was putting out the numbers that it did, Black Myth was recognized as the first benchmark of the first triple-A studio coming out from Asia.
Following Black Myth's success, the game industry experts, the news channels were all looking out for the next generation titles after Black Myth that were considered AAA as well. If you look at the left-hand side of the screen, there is a Yahoo article to which the article has identified 4 titles which they've designated as the next generational AAA IP that's coming out, and Showa American Story is one of the 4. Just to kind of have you understand how big a blockbuster IP can generate. Well, Black Myth was the first AAA content that's coming out from an Asian studio. It was released in August last year. In less than a year, it has generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
In fact, it's generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue, and this is a triple A level kind of result. Of course, it's very hard to replicate what Black Myth had done. Because GCL is a 20% shareholder of Netcom and we are a global publisher of Showa American Story, this means that when the game releases, the revenue share, or at least the profit share in this case, is more than 50% for GCL. If Showa American Story were to even come anywhere close to Black Myth, this title itself would be highly value accretive to our group numbers as well. This is just to help you understand that, you know, as triple A content, if it hits the kind of numbers that Black Myth was putting out, you don't even need to be as big as Black Myth.
Even if you're half as Black Myth: Wukong, with the percentage of revenue share that we have as a global publisher and as a shareholder, it's very highly accretive to our numbers. I'm coming to the end of the slides. The focus right now for GCL as an ecosystem is truly in getting good IP, building an IP pipeline for the future, so that when you release the games, we establish a fan base. IP as a transmedia strategy has been in existence for a good number of years now. We feel that a transmedia strategy is really what you would expect from the entertainment industry. On the right-hand side, you'll see big IPs like Cyberpunk, Sonic, Borderlands.
These are big gaming IPs that have been benefiting from the transmedia strategy that has either been adapted into movies or TV series as well. Just to kind of bring it closer to home, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was a game that we published last November, and we had adapted the transmedia strategy where there's a string of merchandise that has come from the IP, and it's very well received by the fans as well. That there was a film on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that further reiterated just the storyline and the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as it is.
With getting a nice library of IP, that's how we truly future-proof the business as we have the ability to build on new games, new sequels, new adaptations, and with this IP, you're able to kind of collaborate with the hardware side of the business where software will truly drive hardware demand as well. I come to the end of the presentation. I hope it's very insightful for you to kind of understand GCL as a business today. As a parting statement, we hope that, you know, you are excited about the development that we have and the growth of the group by itself, and we do urge you to look out for some of the trailers that are out there to have a better sense of some of the games that we're gonna put forth to the market as well.
I'll take a quick pause here just to see if any of you would have any questions to the business, and I'll address them accordingly as well. Okay, let me just see. One second. Okay. I'm getting a question here. Can you elaborate on the primary revenue streams? The business in the past 18 years had been very distribution in focus. Since 2022, when we went into publishing, and again, this, the answers to the question can be found in our public numbers as well. In the financial year of 2023, when publishing came on board, publishing was about less than 15% of group revenue.
In FY 2024, which was the year that ended in March 31st in 2024, we took a back seat for publishing because that was the year that we were preparing for the IPO. Publishing contribution back then was much lower than 15%. Again, for FY 2025, our full year numbers are not out yet. What you can expect from the public numbers that you have seen from the first half is that the trend for publishing as a contributing factor to the group, ideally over the next few years with the IP that's coming forth over, within our pipeline, publishing will be a bigger contributing factor from before. It's only natural with the strategy that we're putting out today.
With the game development IP that we're developing, over the next few years you would see distribution take on a more stable and passive contribution to the business as it's a very stable element of the business while the IP development and game publishing revenue takes over if the IP takes on well as well. Next question. In the interest of time, I see another question. How do you view the competitive landscape, and what are the key differentiators for GCL? That's a beautiful question, actually. In the gaming industry, I would say that it's pretty fragmented right now. When you look at GCL as a gaming ecosystem, our business is not like Sega, our business is not like Nintendo. We're not like Square Enix. Some of the companies that you're familiar with out there, a lot of focus is on game development.
Today, I think the key differentiator for GCL is that we are a full ecosystem, right? We are a game developer ourselves. We have invested into game development studios as well. Game publishing is an IP investment business, and then we settle the entire downstream side of the business as well. As an ecosystem, we're able to capture a lot of IP and business opportunities, both in the upstream side of business and in the downstream side of business as well. Just a quick question that just popped up as well. What is the cadence for your earnings reports? I know you just went public this year. Will you release quarterly? At this point in time, the cadence is semi-annually, but we understand that this is a need and a want from investors alike.
The short answer is yes, we will look towards transitioning into a quarterly cadence for our financial reporting. At the same time, the company is looking to commit to having earnings calls with analysts as a start. We're speaking to equity analysts that has taken an interest in the company because our numbers and our growth is only just. It's at its inflection point. Based on our first half numbers, you see that we grew by 41% year-on-year. In fact, our growth numbers have never been stronger. Do look out for our full year numbers as we transition towards a more frequent cadence in reporting.
All I can say is that with the milestones that we've generated last year with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, with Black Myth: Wukong, and transitioning to this year where we're going into hardware, the growth of the company has never been stronger. We're very excited for the investors to understand what GCL represents, both in the gaming software and in the gaming hardware as well. Okay.
Great.
So, um-
Sebastian-
I'll leave it back to the panel.
Sebastian, thank you so much for your time today and for your presentation. Again, please make sure to go to GCL Global Holdings Corporate Connect page on the app for updates.
Thank you.
That will conclude day three of the Technology Webinar Week. The next Webull Corporate Connect Webinar will focus on the electric vehicle sector. Please go to the Webull Learn page on the app and click on webinars, Webinars to register. Thank you, and have a great rest of the afternoon.