Good morning. Thank you for joining us for the last day of Needham's 26th Annual Growth Conference. My name is Neil Young, and I'm on the semiconductor research team here at Needham. It is my pleasure to host this presentation from Kopin. Kopin is a leading developer and provider of high-performance, application-specific optical solutions, consisting of high-resolution microdisplays, microdisplay sub-assemblies, and related components for defense, enterprise, industrial, and consumer products. Joining me today from the company is Michael Murray, CEO. Before handing the presentation over to management, I would like to remind folks watching the webcast that if you would like to ask a question, please submit it through the dialog box on your screen. After the presentation, I will come back and moderate Q&A. Michael, thank you for joining us, and over to you.
Thanks, Neil. I'd much rather watch a presentation or a performance by Neil Young, but I'm sure you've heard that joke before. So welcome, everyone. Thank you to our friends at Needham for inviting us to the conference, and we look forward to walking you through what's changed since the last time we spoke, when we were at Needham the last past year. So a few things. Obviously, you'll see that we have a new logo, a new tagline, "Vision beyond imagination," which actually was developed by one of our vice presidents of Business Development and Strategy, and a new website. So we're excited about that. We did ring the bell this past week at Nasdaq, which was a great honor for myself and the rest of the team.
We had over 42 people, ranging from folks from Dalgety Bay, Scotland, to Reston, Virginia, people that have worked at Kopin for over 20 years, on stage with us, and the morale could never be higher for the company at this moment. So as we move forward into application-specific solutions and AI-enabled backplanes, recruiting is going to be very important for us. So creating this new awareness and this new brand, this new logo, a new LinkedIn profile, a new website, et cetera, is all about our talent retainment and talent attraction. So I thought I'd start off with that. Certainly, we have a safe harbor statement, as we usually do.
This document does contain forward-looking statements, and I will abide by that and make sure that when we do talk about what we think we're going to do this year, we have a high degree of probability that that will happen. However, things do happen in the marketplace that are outside of our control. So I wanted to talk a little bit about where we are in the microdisplay market, because I think there's some misconceptions about what we do, where we do it, and who we do it for and with. So I'll be talking about that. Secondly, we are the industry leader here in the United States. We're the only United States company that builds four different types of microdisplays. It's actually very unique.
Worldwide, there's only a few companies that can actually build what we build, in terms of microdisplays, so we'll talk about that. I'll also talk about where we are from a customer perspective. When I took over the role, just over a year ago now, our customer relationships were somewhat strained, specifically in defense. They're not perfect. We continue to work with our customer base to make sure that we're delivering on time in full. That's something we put in place over a year ago. Our quality has greatly improved. We've got a whole new quality group led by an individual that joined us from Raytheon. We also have a brand-new program management team.
These folks come to us from companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics, et cetera, and they really know what they're doing. I think they're some of the best in the industry. Because of these new people and the processes that we've put in place, our on-time and full numbers are hitting higher, high marks. Therefore, we walk into January of this year with a record order book for the company. 2023 was a great order book year for us, was a record, when I say record, excluding the HBT business. Since we've been in the microdisplay business, that was a record year for orders, and we're looking at building, you know, close to $27 million this year alone of thermal weapon sights that we have currently on purchase order today as we sit here.
We do expect another $10 million-$12 million or so of extra and additional orders for deliverables in 2024, on that level, for our thermal weapon sight. Again, a record-setting order book year. When you think about those two programs, one of them we just announced, which is a new weapon sight for the company, that revenue level is quite impressive for a year-over-year increase. So right now, in terms of the balance sheet, we have no debt, we have no warrants on the balance sheet, we have a clean balance sheet, and we're sitting at about 137 employees. We are staffing up for direct labor.
We are essentially going to triple to quadruple our production in Westborough this year, so you will see me start to hire direct labor, so that number is going to increase and is increasing as we speak. As I spoke about earlier, we are hiring in different areas, mostly in direct labor for production. However, we are making some key strategic hires in software and AI. So, in terms of customer base, as I spoke about, we're very blessed to have the world's best customers, market making customers like Collins, Leonardo DRS, and General Dynamics, and we're adding to that list as we speak. We have some new customers that we're going to be announcing over the course of Q1 and Q2, and some exciting new programs that we've just been awarded that you'll hear about later.
The microdisplay market. Everyone likes to follow our good friends in Cupertino, Meta, in Menlo Park. What happens when those customers start to release new products? I believe there's going to be a fairly significant release today from one of those companies. What happens is that release floats all boats, if you will, as a coin of phrase. The market will grow exponentially because of those releases. I believe a 20% compound annual growth rate in microdisplays at this point in time is actually quite small. I think that is likely going to be in the 30%-40% compound annual growth rate as those customers start to get it right. AR/VR headsets are starting to become better.
The ecosystem, and this is what's truly important, not necessarily about the displays in them or how much it weighs or how much it costs. That's all important, too. However, what's really important is the application space that they're now creating for software apps, for more content, and more delivery of that content in an easy, quick way, that a user can use that device for more than 20 minutes at a time. So that's what I'm excited about. I just did a couple of interviews with a few magazines and a couple of newspapers, and the one question that they were asking is, "Why is the AR/VR marketplace not taking off?" And in my mind, it's really three reasons. One, we still force people to use the technology in a way that's not natural to them.
We need to make sure that the technology adapts to the user, and that is the core ethos of Kopin moving forward. That's number one. Number two, the software ecosystem isn't there yet. If you recall, when the Apple phone came out, the first iteration really wasn't all that great. But what was great was your ability to then download apps, and that app network created the iPhone strategy, along with iTunes. And that's what I see happening right now with the Apple Vision Pro. That's what this release is actually about. And, I think I'm looking forward to using it myself, for the first time. So, I think that's number two. And then number three, really, it's about making sure that when we make a microdisplay, the best microdisplay in the world may not be what the user needs.
It might be a different microdisplay architecture, and it might need to have better controls of the microdisplay. So we're getting to a place where 2K, 4K, 8K, whatever K display you wanna have in terms of resolution to your eye, isn't necessarily as important as the control, the control of that microdisplay. Because human beings go through different emotions while they're watching certain things. If you're a weapon fighter, you hit fight or flight. If you're flying a jet, you're hitting fight or flight. If you're in an armored vehicle, again, fight or flight.
If you're a gamer using your spatial computing devices, you actually go through those same emotions, and you need to have a balance level because these included type of headsets will set your brain apart from where your balance truly is and where true north really is. So we're thinking about those new issues in the microdisplay market, and that's where the NeuralDisplay architecture comes into play. The last few meetings that I've had with consumer companies and defense companies, they had one thing in common. One thing in common: each of them brought a Ph.D. in neurology. Why? It's because the display is causing issues with the neurology of the human being and how they use it, and that's what Kopin's trying to achieve with the NeuralDisplay architecture. And that's why I think the market is going to grow.
Again, I mentioned that we are a very unique company in that we're at the forefront, the vanguard of microLED technology. We just announced a relationship with MICLEDI, great company. They figured out a way to get to 12 in wafer development and production in microLEDs far quicker than anybody else. It's not perfect, but it will get there much quicker than everyone else and at less cost. So great relationship that we fostered with those folks. We just announced that, and we believe that we'll be able to get to a monochrome and color microLED and a 12 in wafer manufacturing strategy much quicker than anybody else, and that's critical to enable this market in terms of cost, volume of sales, for things like consumer AR/VR, and more importantly, great quality. We also build OLED displays.
We've been very vocal that we have a relationship with our former founder, former CEO, I should say, and founder, Dr. John Fan, with his company and the OLED development team that we partially spun out over a year ago. They've been heads down, working to develop their technology. They do deposit in China, so that was one of the reasons why we did spin that group out. We've been moving all of our OLED manufacturing and development out of China for DoD application reasons, and I'm happy to report that that is almost complete as we sit here today. So we also have signed up several new OLED vendors, and one of them is actually in Korea, and we'll be announcing that, I'd say, over the next couple of quarters.
So our OLED strategy has come a long way from a year ago. We still have access to consumer-grade OLED out of China, but where we're going as a company, we need DoD-approved OLED suppliers, and we have multiple suppliers as we sit here today. So lots of work being done there by the team. Our liquid crystal on silicon comes out of Dalgety Bay. This is a very interesting display architecture for us, and it's valued by our customer base because it's high refresh rate, and that's why automotive and armored automotive companies have been selecting it.
And of course, our AMLCD technology, which is just great for things like thermal weapon sights, because it's very stable, doesn't really have much image stick issues, unlike the OLED architectures, just because of the nature of the physics of OLED, they have some image retention issues. And in thermal weapon sights, that's not a great thing. But the market is going OLED and thermal weapon sights, and we'll be ready to support that as well. Now, where the company is going, when you think about what an application-specific optical solution really is, it's the marriage between the display, the right display, and the optic, the drive electronics in the housing, the ergonomics, that the human being, the person actually using the technology, needs to have. And that's what's important.
We partner with our customers to develop the right display architecture for their application, and that's what application-specific optical solutions mean. I believe that over the next few months, we'll be announcing our production version of our HMDmd assisted surgical headset. That's in the middle of the slide here. We did demonstrate that at our Nasdaq market reception, and we had several surgeons, actually, from New York come to talk to us about how great the technology is. A gentleman by the name of Dr. Shaw was there, and he said that he's done over 2,000 surgeries, and he thinks this is the "best architecture," quote-unquote. So, we're very proud of that. We look to announce that over the coming couple of months. Still, we have to think about the analog world.
That's what we live in, and we are the digital overlay of the analog world. But what we overlay and how we overlay that technology is what's changing. And what can we actually pull from the user and the user's environment, and then present that as well? And that's really where we're going from a NeuralDisplay Architecture. But again, this is where the marriage between the microdisplay type, again, we build four different types, and the application-specific optical solution get married together to solve the end user's application. A few of the emerging markets that we are seeing, we're very hopeful and expecting decent returns from the medical market. Our existing markets, currently, it's 3D AOI still remains somewhat compressed, simply because of the Chinese issue with semiconductor sales into the United States.
We are seeing more European uptake on high-performance 3D AOI, but we still see some softness in the Chinese business specific to the geopolitical issues there. Defense, we have a great defense order book right now. We are expecting more orders, but as we sit here today, we have significant order cover for 2024. We expect to continue that and hope to announce some new orders and new product orders over the coming months. I talked about this a little bit. This is a critical strategic advantage for Kopin. We spend a lot of time thinking about ergonomic design, how we design and develop technology for the human.
Again, I mentioned this previously. Kopin's new ethos in management and focus is to make the technology adapt to the user, not force the user to adapt to the technology. And when we think about that, this is the type of architecture and development that we do, and it is very difficult to manufacture and also develop those levels of optical capability. And that sets us apart from many of our competitors as well. Over the course of this year, you'll see that many of these programs are going into full rate production. In many cases, the weapon sight orders that we have are now hitting full rate production. We're hitting our stride. Again, as an example, we built around 6,000 units of our thermal weapon sights last year, 6,000-10,000.
This year, we're going to be building around 28 to over 30,000 units of thermal weapon sights through our foundry and factory. So great increase in volume and obviously revenue at that point in time, and at an increased quality level. So, over the course of this year, I think our DoD business is going to flourish. We have some new programs going into production that are in development, including our mobile weapon system for the M1A2 upgrade. That program is still on track. In talking with General Dynamics, they are very much focused on adding our weapon sight to that platform, moving forward and staying on schedule, the original schedule and volume. So we're very happy to hear that.
Even though the SEPv4 upgrade was canceled, Kopin's program is moving forward as it is part of the General Dynamics weapon sight that they are upgrading and retrofitting on their own. So that's great news. And we continue to be focused on Integrated Visual Augmentation System with the folks at Soldier PEO office. We have a number of opportunities in this space. We also have great partnerships that we've created to help this team really create a system that soldiers will use, and there is some work that we're working on with them right now. So over the course of this year, we expect to have a number of new announcements of new programs as well.
But overall, when you think about this, this is about a $70 million annual revenue potential just in the first two boxes. So very exciting growth opportunity for the company. But more importantly, we have the orders to grow this year, and that's really nice to say as we sit here in January. This slide will be updated over the course of the next few quarters as we introduce the NeuralDisplay Architecture and backplane. Again, as a reminder, that's a software-defined backplane. We actually do that today. In some of the architectures that you see here, we do have software-defined backplanes already in this. What we're adding is the AI capability in some cases, and the ability to drive into individual pixels.
And then on top of that, depending on the user and the application, adding in light sensors to do eye tracking, which are very simple sensors that wanna track white, gray, and black. So if you look at human eye, white, the color of your eye, gray, and then the pupil, black. So very unique way of doing eye tracking. It removes several cameras from, as an example, the Apple Vision Pro, lightening, making that system lighter, lowering the power consumption and heat that goes through that system, and that's the architecture that you'll see from us over the course of this year. So these technologies, when you put them all together, again, really set us apart from any competitor, specifically in micro displays. There's not too many companies in the world that can do this level of integration.
But our microdisplays are at the heart of everything we do. Adding the optics and now sensors to this technology portfolio adds a number of arrows to our quiver that we're able to support our customers. The bottom left is really interesting. That is, this is a monochrome green on green, so you can see, this is using our microLED technology, how bright the technology can be. So in a daytime application, that's very important to a soldier and also a gamer, by the way, using spatial computing devices, to have a visual overlay that's bright enough that you can see green on green or blue on blue, and that's a picture of it in the bottom left corner. We're demonstrating that this week, and we have tremendous opportunities for that technology.
We talked about the ability to track assets, whether that asset is an eye or in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping , or SLAMs, that comes out of our 3D AOI technology. We already have this today. This isn't something that's new to Kopin. What is new is adding the ability to do it with AI, and that's the relationship that we have with MIT CSAIL, and then the ability to package that together, ergonomically for a user so that it makes sense for them. I mentioned this earlier, we are still adding to our, our level of patents. We do have some patents that we've filed recently. I've not updated this slide, but we've got a number of new patents that we've issued already that are in the process of being approved.
So this will get updated, but we did add to our patent portfolio in Q4, so this will get updated in Q1. I think we added about three or four new patents in the area of artificial intelligent displays as well as some optical patents. So the innovation engine at Kopin continues, and this is something that's critically important to our future and core to our ethos and culture. So the first time I, I spoke with all of you, actually, I think at this conference, I talked about the, the path to success and the keys to success. It's always starts with people, parts, and processes in my mind anyway, to keep it simple. And we have five strategic initiatives, the path to profitability.
I think we did a good job this year of controlling what we could control, or in 2023, controlling what we can control. We did have some SG&A creep because of this lawsuit that's still out there, that we hope to close off in Q1. If you take that out of our balance sheet and you take a look at the performance of the company, we did very well in terms of controlling our costs. We did have two reductions in force last year. Now we're going the other direction because of the revenue increases that we're expecting this year. We're starting to add heads back in, so very exciting growth expectations for this year. Operational excellence on time in full, the team has really latched onto this. We did upgrade our talent in many ways.
We put operational processes in place to help our quality levels, and now we're adding more data so that we can track it more quickly, so that we can send back raw materials that come into the fab that aren't compliant with our specifications, and the team's doing a wonderful job. As a data point, we sent back more material in Q4 than we did in the last three years of Kopin's existence. So we're tracking our quality very closely and working with our vendors to make sure that we have quality in the door that goes out the door to our customers. So getting much better in that area. I talked about the fab-lite, fabless model. This is something that I follow from Analog Devices or Qualcomm or NVIDIA.
We have great partnerships worldwide to build our semiconductor fabric, as well as the raw components that we need, whether it be OLED or microLED. We have tremendous relationships here, and we have a couple of relationships that we're hoping to announce to the street in the next couple of quarters that I think are real difference makers for our consumer market. The defense HMD strategy going very well. We have a tremendous order book walking into 2024, a record order book, and we continue to add to it with new technologies, new orders. So, very excited there. You'll see some more of that from us this quarter next. Then the talent strategy. One of the unsung heroes on our team is Lindy Li .
She's a team of one, 1.5 or two now, now that we've added to her team. She's done a wonderful job of creating the best company to work for in Massachusetts, I believe, and creating an environment of retainment of the right talent that we need to grow, and then that talent attraction that we need to bring into the company. And I'll tell you, after the week that we had this week at Nasdaq, the morale here couldn't be higher, and I think we're ready to go grow and be successful in our markets and lead as we have in the microdisplay market and the application-specific solutions market. So with that, I will open it up to the team and Mr. Young, I think my time is almost up.
Great. Thank you for that, Michael. Yeah, I just want to remind anybody watching, if you have a question, please go ahead and submit it through the dialog box on your screen. We don't have any questions at this time, but I do have a question for you. So it's all of you guys do some manufacturing in-house and some with your partners. How has pricing at foundries trended over, say, the last three to six months?
Oh, great question. The answer is, unfortunately, it depends on the technology, but I'll go through the ones that I think are most relevant. When it comes to OLED as an example, it's, it's been variable. The reason it's been variable is some companies have jumped into 12 in OLED deposition and manufacturing. I think Dr. Fan's company is doing a great job of working with their partners to develop a 12 in fab in China. I think that's gonna drive a lot of cost out of OLED. And but the problem is there's tremendous supply, but not much demand. And now the demand with, you know, Apple coming out with their Apple Vision Pro, Meta, Sony came out with their own version, which is interesting, as we'll see.
But, I think the OLED cost structure has come down. It's getting much more competitive, as 12 in foundries get created. That's gonna drive a lot of cost out of the OLED market. A microLED, specifically in micro displays, that cost is quite high still, and that's why the relationship with MICLEDI is so important. Getting to a 12 in foundry for microLED will drive tremendous cost out of that architecture, and I think adopt, the consumer market at that point in time. Right now, it's gated by cost. So, that relationship is very important for us, and our ability to work with them and their way of manufacturing 12 in wafers and microLED and our software-defined back plane, actually create a way that we can produce more, even with displays that may not meet the current spec.
That means that we can still use them using software to use them in a different performance code or bucket, if you will. So, I think the costs are coming down. Competitiveness is going up because everyone's expecting demand to absolutely skyrocket in micro displays, and I think we're at the verge of that. Now, I know people have been saying that for over a decade, but at this point in time, usually when Apple comes out with their second or third round of technology, they'll get it right. And when they do, that's when the market really goes, and I think we're getting to that place now. I think it's still not quite there, but it's very close.
Okay, great. I'm seeing no further questions, so I think we can go ahead, and I can conclude this. Thank you for your time, Michael.
Thanks.