LightPath Technologies, Inc. (LPTH)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2026

Sep 10, 2026

Summary

Revenue nearly doubled and gross margin expanded sharply in FY26, driven by a strategic shift to higher-value products and strong demand from defense and public safety sectors. Backlog and cash position reached record highs, with capacity expansion and supply chain management as key priorities.

Operator

Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to LightPath Technologies' fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings conference call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. This conference is being recorded today, September 10, 2026, and the earnings press release accompanying this conference call was issued after the market close today. I'd like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, the company will be making a number of forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations, involve various risks and uncertainties, and discussed in its periodic SEC filings.

Although the company believes that the assumptions underlying these statements are reasonable, any of them could be proven to be inaccurate, and there can be no assurances that the projected results will be realized. In addition, references may be made to certain financial measures that are not in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. We refer to these as non-GAAP financial measures.

Please refer to our SEC reports in certain areas of our press releases, which include reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures and associated disclaimers. CEO Sam Rubin will begin today's call with a strategic overview of the business and recent developments for the company, while CFO Al Miranda will then review financial results for the quarter and the fiscal year. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a formal question- and- answer session. I'd like to now turn the conference over to CEO Sam Rubin. Sam, the floor is yours.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon to everyone, and welcome to LightPath Technologies' fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 financial results conference call. The last few calls I typically opened by talking about the strategy and how the strategy is working and where it's taking us. Tonight, instead, I will let the numbers talk and let the fiscal year results do the talking. Fiscal 2026 is the first year in which the transformation we have been describing shows up cleanly in every line of the financial statements, not just the backlog. Four numbers frames a year. Revenue grew 93%, from $37 million to nearly $72 million. Gross margin expanded from 27%- 36%.

Adjusted EBITDA moved from a $5.1 million loss to a $4.2 million profit, a swing of more than $9 million. Backlog finished at $110.9 million, up 197% from where we started the year. The fourth quarter was our best quarter in every one of those categories. Revenue of $21.2 million was a company record, and our fourth consecutive quarter of sequential growth. Gross margin was 39.4%. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.1 million, or 10% of revenue, which was our fourth straight profitable quarter on that measure.

All great results, which we expect will continue to grow and improve. Now, I'd like to spend a moment on the quality of that margin, because it is the part that I am most pleased with. The 39.4% margin did not come from a one-time favorable contract or from raising prices. It did come from two things we did. First is the mix of products. Assemblies, modules, and cameras were 43% of the fourth quarter revenue and 44% of the full year, compared to 23% of the revenue in fiscal 2025.

These products, which our strategy has really took us towards, have both higher prices and higher margins as a result of the significant value add compared to our legacy component business. Second is execution. The yield and throughput problems that dragged our component margins in the past are, well, they're in the past. Every one of our four product groups improved its margin year-over-year. The mix improvement is a result of strategy. The margin improvement is the results of operation. We needed both, and this year we got both.

While the backlog has not grown sequentially, shortly after we closed the quarter, we reported two large orders totaling $24 million and have been continuing to book and grow our backlog. The backlog you will see for the quarter ending in about three weeks' time will show already some more growth. While we continue securing new customers, both by converting them to Black Diamond and by providing them with assemblies and systems, much of the orders coming now, like the two large orders I just mentioned from July, are for production, as many of the programs we have been working on move from qualification to production.

We have said in the past that a design and qualification of a new program, whether it's a redesign to use Black Diamond or a new program altogether, can take up to two years. Much of the growth in our backlog and bookings recently that we are seeing is the result of such new programs beginning to move into production. Two years ago, in late 2024, China imposed the first restrictions on export of germanium and gallium, and we began to see a growth in demand to Black Diamond and systems using Black Diamond glass. Now we are beginning to see the transition of some of those into production.

A trend I expect will intensify, as most customers did not start their redesign and substitution effort until much after the initial export ban on germanium. To that end, I will provide now an update on some of our key programs we have in the pipeline and their status. As mentioned in recent calls, due to the good problem of experiencing exponential growth in all our sales fronts, I can't really cover all the large programs. Instead, I will focus on ones where we had some changes or recent developments. NGSRI, our three-year-old interceptor program with Lockheed Martin.

As many have heard, the Army has pushed out the timeline by a few months in an effort to potentially explore other options. We do not see this as a risk to us, only a delay. We have seen this happen in multiple other programs where the Army wants to foster a truly competitive environment. Our confidence continues to be very high. Given that our seeker is being designed and evaluated into multiple platforms now, we have little concern here. In the last few months, we have relocated the groups that works on that seeker into a new building and have begun investing in increasing capacity for building seekers.

Knowing that any program that moves into production will need to scale very quickly. More broadly about seekers and missiles. Our camera systems are now being designed into or actively evaluated in seven different platforms, three of which are with Lockheed Martin. The remainder are with primes or as they are sometimes referred to recently, neo-primes. Newer companies entering the defense market. The full qualification of our low-cost seeker that was completed as a result of the NGSRI flight test, as expected, opened the door to many other opportunities. The same manufacturing facility in Texas will support all of those opportunities.

In border patrol or border tower, we have seen funding being released from DHS to the primes. However, that has not yet translated into orders for cameras. What we have seen is a growth in demand for similar towers and cameras that end up installed outside the U.S., primarily in the Middle East. A few other programs. We have an unnamed airborne program which has completed qualification, and we await the production order for LRIP. The Apache program is looking like it might make a comeback soon with a renewed interest in that system.

Drones, and in particular drone dominance programs, are generating significant demand, which we are addressing by starting to add automation to some of our processes for high volume assemblies. Counter-UAS programs continue to move along well with two of the programs now transitioning to a cadence of deliveries of tens of systems a month. In parallel to more design wins of our existing products, the teams have been working on designs and redesigns of additional products, all of which leverage our Black Diamond glass and make use of our supply chain resilience and having alternative materials instead of depending on germanium.

On the camera front, we have been redesigning the last of the G5 cooled cameras to use Black Diamond instead of germanium. That program is progressing well technically, though behind schedule. However, all the results we have seen so far indicated the cameras will work at least as well as the germanium-based cameras. We have also been working on zoom lenses and zoom cameras in what is called long-wave infrared, often referred to as uncooled cameras.

Here, too, we identified an area of the market in which we can leverage our position to provide products without supply chain constraints. An effort that has been ongoing for the last year is now coming to fruition with our first orders for zoom lenses and complete uncooled zoom cameras to be delivered soon. Once those are fully production ready, we expect to see the need in the market translate into orders fairly quickly.

Let me now turn to the structural changes we have completed after year-end, which is the divestiture of our China operation. In July, we signed a definitive agreement to sell our China subsidiary to an entity owned by the local management team that has run the facility for us, for $4.5 million payable in installments over five years. That transaction is expected to close later this month. Financially, it is a modest event. Roughly $4.5 million of annual third-party revenue leaves our consolidated results, and the buyer continues to supply us as a third-party vendor for our commercial customers in the U.S. and Europe.

So there is no disruption to those customers. Strategically, it is not modest at all. Six years ago, most of our manufacturing footprint was in China, and more than a third of our revenue came from China. As of this fall, LightPath now does everything, melts glass, coats optics, builds cameras and assembly exclusively outside of China, in Orlando, in Plano, Texas, in Hudson, New Hampshire, and in Riga, Latvia. We have no ownership, no facility, and no commercial activity in China.

For a customer base that is now dominated by the defense primes and public safety agencies, that is no longer a nice-to-have talking point, but something that will now open up significant bid opportunities where that is a condition for participation. That connects directly to our regulatory backdrop. Defense programs are required to move off optical glass and optical components sourced from covered nations before the end of the decade. What has changed over the last year is not the rule, it is the timing. Qualification cycles for an optical system run two to three years.

The sourcing decisions that determine who supplies those programs in 2029, 2030 are being made now, in this fiscal year and in the next one. However, several executive orders around waivers for germanium and classification of material as critical and specific tariffs applied will likely pull that timeline even closer. Now, to address that, let me talk about capacity a bit, because capacity is our single biggest operational theme going into fiscal 2027. When we acquired Amorphous Materials in January, we increased our Black Diamond melting capacity.

And just as importantly, we unlocked large diameter melting, up to 10 in and beyond, versus the 5 in we could produce before. In optics, the further you need to see, the larger the optics need to be. Large diameter is what opens up long-range camera systems, large assemblies, and space-based missile detection and tracking. I told you in May that doubling the glass capacity was nowhere near enough. That is still true. Demand for glass is running ahead of supply even after the acquisition. We are adding melting capacity in Orlando and Texas.

We are moving the AML [inaudible] operation into a larger building near our Visimid camera business in the Dallas area, and we are expanding downstream capacity in optical fabrication, coating, and assembly across the U.S. and Latvian sites, including adding shifts in all locations. Al will talk about what that means for capital spending. The short version is that fiscal 2027 CapEx will be higher than fiscal 2026, and that is a deliberate choice made against a visible order book and pipeline. Before I hand it to Al, I would like to discuss the balance sheet.

In June, we raised $50 million in a primary offering alongside a secondary sale by North Run Capital, who funded our acquisition of G5. We ended the fiscal year with $93.2 million of cash and effectively no debt. Some of that capital will be used to fund the capacity and working capital required to convert our growing backlog that has now grown over five consecutive quarters and continues to grow, and some will be to pursue accretive capability-adding acquisitions such as the ones similar to G5 and AML that have proven we can execute and integrate. With that, now I will turn the call over to Al Miranda, CFO, to walk through the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2026 financial results. Al, go ahead.

Al Miranda
CFO, LightPath Technologies

Thank you, Sam. As always, I'll keep my review to a succinct highlight of the financials. Much of what we're discussing was also included in our press release issued earlier today and will be included in the 10-K for the period. I encourage you to visit our investor relations webpage to access both documents. In the fourth quarter, revenue increased 73% to $21.2 million as compared to $12.2 million in the same year ago quarter. Sales of infrared components were $7.1 million, 34% consolidated revenue. Visible components were $4.2 million, or 20% of consolidated revenue.

Assemblies and modules were $9.1 million, or 43% of consolidated revenue. Engineering services were $0.8 million or 4% of consolidated revenue. Gross profit increased 210% to $8.3 million or 39.4% of revenue in the fourth quarter as compared to $2.7 million or 22% of revenue in the same year ago quarter. Sam mentioned the reasons for our gross margin increase in addition to better absorption on higher production volume. We also had a quarter carry through of $500,000 of inventory reserve charge last year that didn't recur this year.

Operating expenses for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 were $12.6 million as compared to $7.2 million in the prior year period. Of the $5.4 million increase, $2 million relates to non-cash fair value adjustment to the acquisition earn-out liabilities, which are remeasured through operating expenses until fully settled. The increase is primarily related to G5 Infrared, reflecting its strong performance against the earn-out targets. The final earn-out amount was agreed to and accrued in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 to be paid in January 2027.

The remaining operating expense increase of $3.4 million is primarily comprised of increased selling, general, and administrative expenses, where the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 included the addition of AML operations, incentive compensation accruals, additions to senior leadership team, higher sales and marketing investments, and continued information technology spend to meet customer security requirements. Net loss for the fourth quarter was $4.1 million or $0.06 per basic and diluted share, compared to a net loss of $7.1 million or $0.16 per share in the same year-ago quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $2.1 million or 10% of revenue compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million in the year-ago quarter. This is our fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. As I've said before, adjusted EBITDA is non-GAAP and not a perfect measure, but it is the better indicator of core operating performance because it strips out the non-cash acquisition accounting that otherwise dominates our reported results. For the fiscal year, revenue for 2026 increased 93% to $71.7 million as compared to $37.2 million in the fiscal 2025.

Sales of infrared components were $21.2 million or 30%, an increase of 52% year-over-year. Visible components were $15.5 million or 22% of consolidated revenue, an increase of 32%. Assemblies and modules were $31.9 million or 44% of consolidated revenue, an increase of 281%. Engineering services were $3.1 million or 4% of consolidated revenue, roughly flat with the prior year. Operating expenses for fiscal 2026 were $45.5 million as compared to $22 million in the prior year.

Of the $23.5 million increase, $14.1 million relates to the non-cash fair value adjustment to acquisition earnout liabilities, which I will discuss further in a minute. The remaining operating expense increase of $9.4 million reflects a full year of G5 Infrared operating cost, the addition of AML operating cost, higher sales and marketing spend, information technology investments to meet heightened customer security standards, an increased personnel cost associated with filling executive roles, and accruing for incentive compensation plans.

In addition, new product development costs also increased, which management views as an important part of execution of our strategy and plans to continue to grow our investments in new product developments. I want to be direct about the earnout accounting because it is the largest single line in our income statement this year and the least reflective of our operating performance. The $15.6 million charge in fiscal year 2026 is a remeasurement of what G5 sellers earned, and it moved because G5 is outperforming the amount estimated at the time of acquisition, which per GAAP, was largely weighted based on historical financials.

It is not an ongoing operating cost, and the majority of it is behind us as we've now accrued for the final G5 earnout to be paid in January 2027. There may be small adjustments in future quarters related to AML and Visimid still to come. Adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2026 was a profit of $4.2 million compared to a loss of $5.1 million in fiscal 2025. As Sam said, a swing of $9.3 million. A good indicator of where we're heading. Backlog at June 30th was $110.9 million, up 197% from $37.4 million a year ago.

Approximately $85.6 million of that is requested by customers for delivery within 12 months. I'll touch on CapEx as Sam mentioned. It is an indicator of how we are managing growth. In fiscal year 2026, we spent $6.3 million in CapEx, $4.4 million in Q4 alone. The last time we spent at that level was in calendar year 2023 when we expanded the Orlando facility and doubled the size of the manufacturing and the clean room. The fiscal 2027 plan is larger and more ambitious. We will expand all of our locations to meet the backlog we have and the demand we foresee through fiscal 2027 and into fiscal year 2028.

The plan is to get ahead of demand in some key areas like the production of Black Diamond glass. With that in mind, let me close with the frame I would use if I were on your side of the call. Two years ago, this was a $32 million per year revenue business with negative adjusted EBITDA, $3.5 million of cash. This fiscal year, it is a $72 million revenue business with positive adjusted EBITDA, $93 million cash, no debt, and $111 million order book that continues to grow. The work in fiscal 2027 is to add capacity fast enough, hold the margin gains, and convert the book. That is a straightforward execution mandate, and it is fully funded. With that, I'll turn the call back to Sam for some closing remarks.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Thank you, Al, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Fiscal 2026 was the year the pieces came together. A full year of G5, the addition of AML, a fortified balance sheet, a Western-aligned manufacturing base, and a set of programs that are moving from qualification into production. The upcoming fiscal 2027 will be different kind of year. It is less about proving the thesis and more about scaling against it. Doubling a manufacturing business in 12 months is hard. Doing it twice in a row is harder, and it will require capacity we are still building and people we are still hiring.

We are clear-eyed about it, but we are doing it with $93 million of cash, no debt, two domestic glass plants, the broadest portfolio of infrared materials available, and a customer base that increasingly cannot source for what they make from anyone else in acceptable terms. With that in mind, I want to close before we open for Q&A, by thanking the LightPath team. You, my team, delivered a record year while integrating two acquisitions, migrating infrastructure, and building capacity underneath a backlog that tripled. That is a great deal to ask of an organization our size, and you delivered it. With that in mind, I'll turn it back to the operator for Q&A. Operator?

Operator

Thank you, Sam. At this time, we will open the floor for questions. If you'd like to ask a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad now. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star two. Again, that is star one to ask a question. We'll take our first question from Clarke Jeffries with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Clarke Jeffries
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. First question, just looking out to 2027, that $86 million that's sort of primed for delivery in 2027. Wondering if we could get a sense of the major programs that are embedded there and those two large contracts in July, are they set for 2027 delivery? And one follow-up.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Sure. I will answer the second part first. Yes, they are for 2027 delivery, the two large contracts that were in July. What is also nice about them or really encouraging about them, they are already production, and both of them are a cadence of deliveries spread over months. Therefore, we expect them to be renewed in the years to come as kind of programs of record typically do. Secondly, in terms of breakout of it, Al, I do not know if you have it by product group, but application-wise, Counter-UAS is still probably one of the biggest parts in there.

Optics for drones and assemblies for drone dominance is a growing part in there. We do not have a lot of border patrol in there yet because the funding that has flown through to the primes has not come its way to us. I would say primarily Counter-UAS right now is a very big driver.

Clarke Jeffries
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Perfect. Then just wondering if, Sam, you could give a little bit of additional context for G5 and the redesign timeline. Just any reasons for the delay and maybe just a right setting on the earliest contribution you would expect from those redesigned products. Thank you.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

I think supply chains are stretched everywhere, and the redesign, while it does not require redesigning the entire camera, there are still mechanics and some other lenses that need to be redesigned and some changes. So we are starting to feel the supply chain, especially on the detector side, impacting us across the board. So it really impacted that part is one. The second is, while Amorphous are able to melt the glass in that size, it is the first time, or one of the first times Amorphous was melting that glass.

Melting those kind of glass is not a plug-and-play recipe. Even for us, from the moment we licensed the novel materials, it took us three years until we started producing them. So there is quite a bit of fine-tuning that once you start melting it. We are lucky to have an incredible team as we do at Amorphous that is able to do that at a really record time. There is still more effort than just saying, "Okay, we will melt it," and that is it.

Clarke Jeffries
Analyst, Piper Sandler

Perfect. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Again, as a quick reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star one now. Our next question will come from Austin Moeller with Canaccord. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Austin Moeller
Analyst, Canaccord

Hi, good afternoon, Sam and Al. My first question, on the border patrol cameras or the equivalent overseas, are the overseas camera opportunities, are those foreign military sales to Middle East allies, or is that the U.S. Air Force and the Army deploying those on bases? What could the TAM look like compared to border patrol?

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Those are mostly foreign military sales to allies. The Air Force and so on, those are mainly Counter-UAS systems, the different C-UAS systems. I was talking about border patrol and towers along the borders of different Middle East or North African countries. The TAM is a bit difficult to tell because I do not know that market well enough. We are in it, sort of we are one down. We are sub-primes there. I would say that every deal like that comes in usually is in the tens of millions of dollars for us.

Austin Moeller
Analyst, Canaccord

Okay. I understand you have shipped SPEIR cameras, at least initial prototypes to the Navy, and they installed them immediately. How many more SPEIR cameras can be made available to the Navy in the next 12 months and installed remotely in Southeast Asia? Just given this tanker war, they are getting pelted by drones every day.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Well, I cannot speak for the Navy and about their installation process or timelines. We did ship, I believe, the first camera or maybe two, and I think we have another five cameras in dispatch before we get another order. Those five are expected to ship really in the next few weeks. Beyond that, I really have no visibility into the process once we ship them until they make it onto the ships.

Austin Moeller
Analyst, Canaccord

Okay. Awesome. That is super helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Well, great. Thanks, Sam and Al. Let me ask a couple of questions. Apologies for any ambient noise here in a loud area. Sam, I want to follow up on NGSRI. You made some prepared remarks here about not seeing any risk in the contracting proposal, I think is the term used by the government or the army for this. I'd love to get a little more detail as to why you don't think that's a risk here. I think that anyone who read this as I do the first time, it made it sound like they were dissatisfied in some manner with the current options here. You've expressed a lot of confidence in the solution you're supporting there. So, would love to get a sense of why you think that's very low risk here, please.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Yeah. So I'll refer here to an article that was published earlier this week. I can't remember the name of it, but the person there described, I think pretty accurately, that there are tens of thousands of launchers deployed in the field of the old Stinger missile. These new missiles need to be reverse compatible with those launchers. I'm not going to go into details of what the effort it takes to do that and what either Lockheed or Raytheon had to go through to do it. I will point out that this program has been in the works for three years already or even more.

So this isn't something where even if you have a great missile, you can show up with it tomorrow morning and it will meet all the requirements and get in there. I view this more like the, to take an analogy, the XM30 or MX30 tank. Sorry, I forget which the order of the letters are. Not tank, sorry, carrier. That just a couple of weeks ago, the army said, "Okay, there are two main primes on this." Same thing exactly. We're going to open it up to see if by any chance anyone has someone else, something else to do our due diligence properly.

I think that the military organization as a whole is seeing that some of the neo-primes and new primes go off and often develop some solutions on their own dime as they sort of, if we build it, they will come. And it's doing their work properly, and I applaud them for that by saying, "Hey, before we stick to the same way we've been doing this for years, let's just check if someone happened to have developed something that fits the bill here and can do it."

I don't think this has come necessarily from being dissatisfied as much as it has come from the landscape is changing. If on all, on most systems out there that you see, even if there are two primes, it gets opened up again to an industry day or a call for RFIs to see if there's something else that anyone else developed. I just think that it's highly unlikely that someone had something that was developed here and that can fit the bill exactly in this short timeframe.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Somebody would have to be well down the road in developing something right now if they were going to hit that April timeframe next year, right? And the community for building these sorts of things is pretty small. I imagine this is probably well known if it exists. Does that mean you don't think there's anyone out there that has that?

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Well, I wouldn't quite say that. I don't know all the players out there and never say never, but I would say that both Lockheed and Raytheon are very, very experienced and really know what they're doing. And they've been working on this for three years. Everyone is welcome to reach their own conclusions. I don't want to jump to conclusions for other people.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Okay. That's fair enough. Thanks for that perspective, Sam. Appreciate that. My second question is, in your prepared remarks, you also talked about some missile programs here. I took good notes here about seven different platforms you're being evaluated for through with Lockheed Martin and some other ones. Maybe you could talk about some of these programs if you're able to, and maybe if you can convey either average platform size or total TAM or something just to give us a sense here. Because it seems like missile programs can be pretty sizable like the NGSRI that you're already on. Maybe you can talk about the opportunity and kind of timeframes when those might be decided. Thank you.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Yeah, definitely. I have to be a bit careful here. First of all, some of them, we don't know enough about the end program to relate that. We know what we're told, but we don't know enough about it. Others might be very early or in a stage where they really don't want us talking about them. Let's just say that there was a talk by one of the generals recently from the Army, talking specifically about air defense being a very layered approach, where you have short-range interceptors, mid-range, long-range, and even recently, there was a call for space-based interceptors.

The Army and the Department of [War] as a whole need an entire range of products and not one. There isn't one fits at all. There is a very big push right now on building up capacity and refilling the inventory of THAAD and PAC-3, Patriot PAC-3. But there's probably an even bigger push at the next generation of all these interceptors. I would say we're in almost all different types of interceptors or precision munition. When I say missiles, it's not only interceptors, some of them are precision munition also. But I unfortunately don't have numbers really I can share at this point.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Okay. Yes, sir. Appreciate all that detail. Thank you, Sam.

Operator

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Jon Hickman
Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I probably should know the answer to this, but could you explain to me what is a zoom camera?

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Yeah. Zoom camera means it can change its field of view. Like in your iPhone, you can zoom in and out of the picture, right? Magnify it. As opposed to a fixed focus camera. So cameras and optics we make for the small drones, those usually cannot zoom. They have a fixed field of view. You see one area because you are really trying to trade off weight and size. But the larger platforms all have the ability to zoom in and out.

Jon Hickman
Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann

Okay. I have one more question. In the past, you have indicated that you thought you had a multi-year kind of runway before there might be other solutions for germanium, to replace germanium other than your Black Diamond glass. How do you feel about that now?

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

I feel like we actually have more time than I thought. I recently took a look at some of the announcements about germanium capacity. So you have on one hand Umicore, the Belgium company that is considered the most promising in increasing capacity and having a mine in Congo. They recently announced that what they are producing now is really only 3 tons- 4 tons of germanium a year.

What they expect to produce in a few years, and they are talking about four to five years, is more, but is definitely nowhere near solving all the problem. Then you look at some of the awards to companies in the U.S. that are either on the mining or refining, and each one of them is talking about single digits tons of germanium. So I think we might have more time than I thought.

Jon Hickman
Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann

Okay. Just so my math is correct, you reported a backlog of $110 million, then you reported these two big contracts for another $21 million or $22 million. So if you add that to your backlog and then subtract whatever our estimates are for Q1, that should be close to a backlog for Q1?

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Well, except that we also ship product out, and we are continuing to grow. So I would not quite say it is guaranteed that that is a backlog. But definitely the backlog has been growing quite a bit since $110 million. So I think at the end of this quarter, we will have a very healthy backlog to report.

Jon Hickman
Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann

Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. Nice quarter.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Thank you.

Al Miranda
CFO, LightPath Technologies

Thank Jon.

Operator

Thank you. We do have a follow-up from Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Thanks, Sam and Al. Let me ask one more here. Sam, to follow up on the supply chain comments here, I'd love to get a sense of what are the kind of long poles in a tent here or the most difficult hurdles to overcome here for adding capacity across all the elements of what you're trying to do here, just kind of holistically or qualitatively, and over what timeframe do we expect to see this capacity increase completed? Thank you.

Sam Rubin
President and CEO, LightPath Technologies

Yeah, that's a great question. Adding capacity in a vertically integrated company is kind of like a whack-a-mole game, if you would, because you solve one problem, and it pops up elsewhere. However, right now, by far, glass is our biggest capacity constraint. We're adding a lot. That's where spending on CapEx is coming from. A lot of it is around the glass. We will probably need to add even more. We're adding it mainly for our systems, but also for some other customers or for subsystems. After the glass, the detectors are the long pole in the tent, which we don't have much control over.

The lead time on them has been growing from, I think, six months to 10 months, even more now. So you see that in our inventory where we are building up and preparing parts ahead of time and ordering them knowing that our vendors can't really react fast enough. After that, it really breaks down pretty quickly into many, many small things. Mechanics. Motors have become a really big deal because of the magnets in the motors now. It's the same pain everyone is feeling everywhere, I think, of making an integrated system.

Richard Shannon
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Great. Thank you, Sam.

Operator

Thank you. This concludes our question and answer session and today's event. Thank you for joining LightPath Technologies fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect your line.