Hi everyone, I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. Thank you for joining day two of our 45th annual growth conference. We're very pleased to have with us today Michael Murray, CEO of Kopin , a local company, a provider of optical display solutions. Michael, please go ahead.
Wonderful. Thank you very much, George. I appreciate the invite from our friends here at Canaccord. I hope you're all having a wonderful couple of days in Boston. It's not too balmy out there, so I will try to be brief and talk about some of the exciting news at Kopin. Before I do that, I'll introduce myself. My name is Michael Murray. I'm the Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, and President of the company. Just a little bit about me. I grew up in Canada. Don't hold that against me. They did let me into the country. Yes, I do play hockey very well. It's a prerequisite. I came to Kopin from a company called Ultra Electronics, doing NSA Type 1 cryptography and electronics.
My background is a semiconductor engineer, where I spent over a decade at a little company called Analog Devices down the road here on 128 in Wilmington. That's my background. I'm the second CEO of Kopin Corporation. It was founded by Dr. John Fan, who had two PhDs, one from MIT, one from Harvard. Obviously, he's a slouch. He ran the company for 40 years. I'll get started with a little safe harbor statement. I want you to all read this. There will be a test at the end, and I do give away free prizes for those that get it right. A little bit more about the company. We're in a transformational stage. I've been with the company for just over two years at this point in time. What's important to know about this slide is that we're a semiconductor at the heart of what we do.
The problem is, and what we're solving for currently, is there is not one semiconductor manufacturer who builds microdisplays that's profitable. Not one. Sony, not profitable. Samsung, not profitable. LG, definitely not profitable at the moment, building microdisplays specifically. Yields in this business, if you get 50% yield, you're doing very well. In semiconductors, if you're at Analog Devices, if you're getting 90% yield, you're not doing well. In contrast to this, if you get 25 %- 50% yield, you're doing very well. That's a critical thing for our investors to understand. Yield equals loss. Loss equals lost profits. Very simple. What to do? What we did was we chose to go up the vertical chain and build what we call application-specific solutions. We're going to do that for our tier-one customer base, which I'm going to talk about now as we walk forward.
Before I do, I want to talk about a transaction that just happened. Most of you probably don't know a company called THEON. THEON is a very large $1.7 billion corporation based out of Greece, traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. What's super cool about them is they're growing 50% compound annually for the last six years. Their stock price has accrued 169% growth in the past two years. Why? The company is run very well by a gentleman by the name of Christian. He's a good friend of mine. They are focused in NATO, Europe, and Southeast Asia. They provide what I think is some of the best technology in the world in thermal weapon sights and also thermal night vision goggles to NATO allies, of which Kopin currently sells $0 to.
We created this partnership between Kopin and THEON International, mainly because we have a facility in, actually in Dalgety Bay, Scotland. That facility is very much underutilized. We utilize it at about 15%. It has been our biggest profit leaker over the course of the last two years. The absorption rate in that facility has been about 15%. Now it's going to go up to above 50%, and therefore we'll turn that business into a profit. Moreover, we moved much of our production into Dalgety Bay, Scotland for our microdisplays. Now THEON can take those microdisplays out of Europe and ship them in Europe and not have to pay any tariffs. That's a good deal for them. Moreover, THEON spends single high-digit millions to tens of millions of dollars in OLED and LCD microdisplays, of which now Kopin can compete on those sockets.
They're also incentivized by 49% ownership in Dalgety Bay to use that facility for their use cases. A very, very key deal for us. Moreover, at this point in time, it adds $15 million to our balance sheet in cash. We'll be sitting with over $40 million in cash for the company, and we're going to use that money and put it to work to grow our overall competitiveness in Southeast Asia, Europe, and with NATO allies. The vast majority of the business I'm going to go through here is predominantly focused in the United States. Now we have a rest of world global enterprise for Kopin for the first time ever in our history. We also have additional project funds. You'll see in the 8-K that we just announced, there's another $8 million of cash available to Kopin over and above the $15 million.
That is for specific pursuits that we have as two companies that we've identified that we want to go after together, and we'll use those funds as we see fit. Lastly, we've created a product called DarkWave that is an overlay to night vision goggles, which THEON will create a purchase order for us so we can take that business to market in Dalgety Bay, Scotland. We think for one of the big countries in NATO. Look for an announcement on that shortly. We also have just entered into our first ESG strategy. This was big for our announcement with THEON. ESG in Europe is much bigger than it is here in the United States, believe it or not. We thought it was important to have the ability to have our index funds and passive ETF flows because we were awarded back onto the Russell this year.
We're now on the Russell 2000 and 3000. Having an ESG strategy is still very important to passive flows on ETFs. What's different about Kopin is other than Sony, Kopin is the only company that builds all four different types of microdisplays, and we invented a fifth kind, which we're going to go through today and show you for the first time. It is an AI-enabled microdisplay that looks back at you while you're using it to dynamically control your brightness and contrast so that your eyes don't have to glint, squint, or blink. We're going to talk about why that's important to consumer companies and defense companies alike. I'm going to go through this one. We talked about Dalgety Bay. What's important there is we build our liquid crystalline silicon technology as well as OLED and some of our micro-LED technology.
In Reston, Virginia, we build our head-mounted displays and also our new CR3 headset, which we just announced with Carl Zeiss out of Germany. I'll go through that in greater detail in a moment. We're headquartered here in Westboro, Massachusetts. Straight up 90, about a half hour, and you'll be at our front door. Please let us know if you're interested in coming by for a fab tour. We do love having our investors come in and say hello. One of the things that we're known for is our devices that go into high-speed aircraft. If you have heard of some of the aircraft that the United States puts out in place and some of the ability to see through optics, that is something that we've been involved with for a number of years.
We currently have our LCD technology, our OLED technology, and micro-LED technology in what we call our fast-moving aircraft application. I can't say which one, but it is one of the most lethal aircraft in the world, and we are in all of those headsets today. You'll notice from our previous slides, this slide has grown quite a lot. I'm very proud of this slide because we're now starting to see companies like AeroVironment, Blue Halo, Wilcox , Zeiss, THEON International, the Army, the Navy. When I started with Kopin two years ago, this slide was about half its size. These are top-tier defense companies and top-tier medical and consumer companies. I'm very proud of the progress that we're making here with our top customers.
We're focused on improving technology performance, and we are the digital overlay on the real analog world, meaning we see through things and provide the ability for symbology and any sort of augmented reality that you might want in really mission-critical systems. This is our fifth type of microdisplay. If you want to hit play there, I'm not sure if I can. There we go. This is what we demonstrated for the first time at AWE in California. This is the microdisplay, what we call NeuralDisplay. It has tiny pixels, red, green, and blue, but the fourth pixel is usually blue for deep color. We changed that fourth pixel to be an imager, and that imager looks back at you, just like when you were playing Battleship as a kid. Oh, it's over. There we go. Sorry, YouTube, I can't control that. It's live.
That fourth pixel is a tiny imaging pixel that looks back at your eye for white, green, and black, or white, gray, and black. We're able to adjudicate how big your pupil will get with how much brightness we're shining at your eye at a given time. Just like getting up at night when you go to the bathroom, pitch dark, you turn on the light and you have to squint. Imagine flying an F-35 doing the same thing or getting shot at at the same time. It's not very comfortable. You have 500 microseconds to dynamically tune that microdisplay from being too bright to just right. Moreover, if you're a spatial computing device user, you want that same technology so that you can use that device long enough to watch a movie. Right now, that's what's gating things like Apple or Meta and the adoption rate of spatial computing.
If I go back here, if I can go back, let's see if that same slide is up. This is the Apple Vision Pro. Look at the weight difference. That is just in cameras alone. We are half the weight, half the size, half the power consumption because we take all of those cameras doing eye tracking and control, and we put it into the microdisplay. I'm going to spend some time here as well. This slide has definitely expanded in the last year because of the conflicts in Europe, because of the conflicts in Israel. Kopin is one of the best companies in the world at providing microdisplays and optics in mission-critical devices. We have new orders to announce very shortly in our thermal weapon sight program. We are on two different iterations of the next-generation short-range interceptor, otherwise known as the Stinger missile program.
The United States is going to supply over 100,000 Stinger missiles in the next three years. That translates into roughly 100,000 Stinger missile launchers, and Kopin is on that program with Lockheed as we speak. DarkWave, very interesting technology. We're demonstrating that now. It takes a dumb night vision goggle. If anyone's seen Zero Dark Thirty as an example, you put your night vision goggles on, you can see at night. That's really cool. DarkWave provides thermal imaging, so you can see thermally if there is anybody else in the room, plus symbology. Green good, red bad. Very simple. That adds technology to an already installed base at THEON and here in the United States. Remember, THEON is the world's leader in night vision goggles for all of NATO. This is burger, and that's the fries for THEON.
We already have an install base of close to 20,000 night vision goggles. I'd be remiss in not talking about our integrated visual acuity system strategy. This is what they call a program called SBMC or Soldier Born Mission Command or IVAS 1.2. You may have heard of a company called Anduril and Palmer Luckey. They've novated that contract from Microsoft. There is a new contract that is going to be let, we believe, this year called Soldier Born Mission Command. We are working with a number of companies that are bidding for that as prime contractors. Kopin is not bidding as a prime contractor. We are bidding as a key technology acquisition specialist for microdisplays and optics. If Kopin were to win the microdisplay in Soldier Born Mission Command, that would be an upwards of $500 million- $750 million of revenue to Kopin over the course of 10 years.
I'll say that again, $500 million- $750 million of revenue starting in 2027 for Kopin. We are very close to announcing some major developments in that area. This technology would be focused on, again, digital overlays on the real-time world and making sure that our soldiers have the best technology in the world so that they can see as well as anyone else in day or night. Unfortunately, China, Russia, and Iran already have this technology. We do not. The U.S. government has always said we need to own the night. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we no longer own the night. China, Russia, and Iran do because they have this technology and we don't. This is very important to our future. It's all based around our color micro-LED.
My goal is to announce very, very soon an award for our monochrome micro-LED, and we will be the only United States company with a monochrome micro-LED flying in an aircraft in production. We have the pedigree, we have the providence, and we have the engineers to do it. We just need the Army to award this technology for us, and that will unlock the Soldier Born Mission Command contract for Kopin. I spoke about this earlier, the next generation short-range interceptor. We're working in two areas. A company called Blue Halo Aero Vironment, we've been partnering with them on the next generation weapon fire, as well as the ability to simulate the binoculars and monoscopes so that we can train our troops on how to use the next generation short-range interceptor once it's available from Lockheed and/or Raytheon.
Not only do we have the training and simulation side, but we're also working on the production side so we can train our troops on the same technology and how to use it at the same time. These are very different technologies from very different companies, but these are publicly announced awards, and we were just awarded an urgent upgrade to this design, and we've been requested to move more quickly because they want to move into production more quickly than we originally had thought. Good news there for Kopin and certainly a tremendous opportunity for growth with the Stinger missile coming into production. I mentioned this earlier. You can now go to the Carl Zeiss website. This is our CR3 headset that we partnered with HMDmd. This is now in surgery today. We've done over 200 surgeries with the headset.
I think one of the leading hospitals is NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where they've done over 200 surgeries using this headset. The adoption rate here is a little bit slow. That's how medical works. We have the technology, and it is now in production with Carl Zeiss, and we're expecting orders for production for 2026 that are pretty exciting for this headset. Kopin designed, built, and supplies this entire headset to Carl Zeiss through HMDmd. I want to spend a little bit of time here. Consumer is still very interesting for us. We're currently doing studies of how NeuralDisplay can actually enable this market. Size, weight, power consumption still gate spatial computing. We all know this. We have to get rid of the power. We have to get rid of the size and the cameras that go into these headsets.
Right now we're doing studies of how we could use micro-LED as well as very high-frequency LCoS displays with a NeuralDisplay backplane. LCoS is interesting in this market because of the refresh rate. An LCoS display can refresh at about 480 Hz top end. To give you a sense, your standard TV at home is about 90 - 120 Hz. This thing's smoking fast and very, very good for gaming applications. I'm not going to go through the market opportunity. I think you all know that NATO is going to be spending over $1 trillion, or NATO countries will be spending $1 trillion in defense, and the U.S. Department of Defense will spend $1.3 trillion in defense. Big market for us, and it's mostly focused around soldier-born systems, soldier-born projectiles, and obviously thermal imaging, of which we do better than anyone, in my view, in the world.
Kopin has a rich portfolio of patents. We now have six patents in AI-enabled microdisplays. We're the only company that I'm aware of that has an AI-enabled bidirectional human-in-the-loop capability. That capability was written in an award that went to the Secretary of Defense. It was actually a white paper, I should say, that went to the Secretary of Defense in January. It's available online that states the United States needs micro-LEDs and human-in-the-loop technology to surpass China and Russia. Kopin is the only company that has this capability today. Q2 revenue was a disappointment. We had some things go on in Q2 because of the budget and some of the delays. It created some customer concern around their portfolios and their forecasts. The good news is we now have received the orders that we were expecting in the first half.
We'll execute on those orders and announce them very shortly here in the second half. Quality has remained very much in focus for us. We're still sitting at 97%. This is a tremendous improvement for the company. I'm very proud of the progress that we've made there. Our opportunity pipeline is now ballooned at just shy of $850 million of qualified factored opportunities that are either in the U.S. Department of Defense or now with our friends at NATO and Southeast Asia and Europe through THEON International. Great progress there. We did have a good bookings quarter. It just didn't happen as quickly as we thought. Moving into this quarter, we think that bookings number may double in terms of bookings. We're still tracking $20 million of research and development orders that we're expecting this quarter as well.
Research and development is very important to the company because as soon as we receive those orders, we can start billing and actually accruing that revenue. I want to take a moment to recognize Rich Sneider. He's in the back here. He's been our CFO for 26 years. He is retiring. Sorry to see Rich go, but we did hire a gentleman by the name of Erich Manz from Allegro MicroSystems, and Erich starts on September 2nd, and Rich will start to run marathons again probably on September 3rd. Big thank you to Rich for all of his stewardship, leadership, and friendship, quite frankly, in the last three years with myself included. All right, that's the investment highlights. I can take a few questions if that's okay.
Of course. Thank you, Michael. That was great. Maybe to start just in terms of your positioning in the U.S., I mean, we've talked about this in the past, but how many providers, American providers of your technology are there?
Yeah, so there was a company called eMagin out of New York. eMagin provides OLED displays, but they don't do what we do. They don't have the four other types of microdisplays, and they don't do vertically integrated subsystems like we do. That would be the nearest competitor, which eMagin was acquired by Samsung. Question about how invested they are in the defense industry, quite frankly. They do make decent displays. We don't make every OLED display that's out there, so they are competitive in that area, and we do compete head-to-head. That would be the closest competitor for us.
You talked about multiple programs both in the U.S. and now internationally through your new THEON partnership. Can you help us sort of compartmentalize what that could mean over the next couple of years for the company?
Absolutely. In working with THEON, we've identified $25 million of real revenue opportunities by 2027, 2028 that the company wants to gain in the rest of the world. That additional $25 million of revenue in the rest of the world is very achievable. Even with just THEON spending alone, we think we can get to half that. Very low number, low bar to jump over. That gets us, Kopin, to $100 million in revenue in 2027, 2028, depending on how these other programs go, which is very exciting growth for Kopin. Expecting 25% of our revenue to come from the rest of the world, I think is reasonable. That would be great growth for the company sitting at $50 million of revenue last year.
Maybe to focus on SBMC, which is obviously a huge opportunity, talked about a lot. Maybe help us understand the milestones that we should be paying attention to over the next few months and to figure out exactly how you're positioned.
Great question. We actually had the first milestone already happen. The first milestone was we received an order from the U.S. Army to provide them a plan to build prototypes of a color micro-LED. The next milestone is they're going to place, hopefully, an order to build prototypes of a color micro-LED. That'll be in the range of $15 million- $20 million. That's not all that exciting in and of itself. Once we create that color micro-LED, that unlocks the opportunity of Soldier Born Mission Command, which is $500 million - $750 million of revenue to Kopin. More than that, it opens up the opportunity for night vision goggles, the next-generation thermal weapon sights, or next-generation squad weapon fire. Those in and of themselves are about $100 million each.
If we were to be awarded a research and development contract by the Army directly, we will most likely be, unless we screw it up somehow, the vendor in Soldier Born Mission Command, because a color micro-LED, the brightness is 100 x better, the contrast is 100x better for the same amount of voltage and power consumption as the standard OLED, and it lasts pretty much forever.
Any questions from the audience?
One of the things I noticed, Michael, you said SBMC has the potential for $500 million- $750 million of revenue. I think that's up from the last time where you said it was in the $300 millions. Could you just kind of walk us through where that increase came from?
Yeah, we think it's going to be more expensive to build a color micro-LED. I wish I had a better answer for you, but unfortunately, color micro-LEDs are very expensive because of the yield. Our studies are showing that our cost structure on a color micro-LED is actually higher than what we thought it was going to be. To give you a sense of volume, we're expecting obviously two displays per headset, 10,000 - 12,000 headsets per year starting in 2027. You can kind of do the math from there of what we expect each display to amount to. We also added the aspect of providing an optic with that microdisplay. It's not just the microdisplay, we'll actually provide an optic with it, a piece of glass or magnifier that goes along with that design. That's the other increase that's in that number.
That's something we do every day, by the way. That's well within our capability.
It's a great place to stop. Thank you, Michael.
Great, George. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time. Thank you.