Sally Washlow, CEO of Orion, and after we're gonna have Per Brodin for the Q&A section. Welcome.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for attending. I'm gonna speak about Orion and happy to answer any of your questions as well. Who is Orion? Our organizational mission is that we help customers achieve their sustainability, energy savings, and carbon footprint reduction goals through innovative technology and innovative service, which I will go through. Our business segments are comprised of a lighting segment, maintenance and technical services, and EV charging systems.
Within our lighting segment, this is where we design, we manufacture as well in a U.S.-based facility in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and we install energy-efficient LED lighting systems. We are proud to say that we have had over 25,000 projects that are completed, and I'll also wanna highlight here that we work with many IoT providers as well within their controls, which are often needed in the facilities that we are working within.
We have multiple go-to-market methods within our lighting business. Some of it is full turnkey, which I'll share a bit about. We also work with agents and distributors, and we also work with ESCOs, otherwise known as energy service providers. We have many repeat clients, which I'll show on an additional slide as well, that year-over-year, they're coming to Orion to help them with their energy savings and solutions.
In our maintenance and technical services group, this is where we are delivering reoccurring services across lighting and EV systems. You might have seen recently, about six months ago, a highlight of this division is with one of our largest partners. We have a three-year maintenance contract with them worth $45 million. Day in and day out, our maintenance teams are working and supporting this customer.
That's within the LED lighting realm. We also have a maintenance group that services many of the EV charging deployments that we have as well. Within EV charging systems, another segment of ours, we're here providing end-to-end commercial EV charging solutions where we are working with partners on site design, installation, and commissioning of EV charging systems to support the growing need for EV infrastructure within the U.S.
We do not produce EV charging systems. We work with premier hardware partners such as ChargePoint, ABB, and InCharge as well. We believe that we have nimble technology and an unrivaled ROI. We provide many value adds to the market and to our customers. With our industry-leading design and technology through our own engineering and product development teams, we are working on providing the highest energy efficiency and smart design to deliver our customers the most ROI for their projects.
That's often why we win projects, is because of this ability that we are working with them from the very beginning of their projects. Our unique turnkey capability, we are known for delivering projects from concept to completion, not only that, but on time and within budget. Within our design and manufacturing flexibility, I did mention earlier that we do have a manufacturing facility that you'll see in the image here, 266,000 sq ft of manufacturing capability in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, but we also rely on a global supply chain as well, working with contract manufacturers anywhere from Asia, Southeast Asia, to Mexico as well to supplement the needs of our customers. When we do manufacture here in the U.S., we are capable of complying with the BAA and BABA-compliant projects as well.
Our accelerated product development, we are known for as well. We can bring product to market within four to six months, and sometimes that is utilizing our manufacturing facility in Wisconsin and then maybe transferring it to one of our contract manufacturers once we have started the project as well. This enables us to win projects and continue our market leadership. We have a broad sales reach, as I noted beforehand, whether we're selling directly to national accounts, working through our agent network, ESCOs, and resellers. I often like to say to the team, we need to be where the customers are and can reach us, and we'll service them as appropriate. We have a blue-chip customer base. Many have been repeat business clients for over 20 years.
In terms of our lighting segment and another image of our manufacturing facility in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, this really enables us to have a competitive advantage, whether it's bringing product to market quickly and/or customizing a product to a customer's needs as well. We can service those needs within our Manitowoc, Wisconsin facility, and we can also reach into our global partner network as appropriate. We maintain significant component, material, and finished good inventories for quick turnaround.
Recently, we did some customer studies, and lead time is very important in our industry. Nobody wants their project held up because lighting is not delivered on time. We are known for that as well and for our flexibility on how we can deliver the products to the market. Our custom manufacturing capability has been a tremendous advantage for us to win national account rollouts.
We're usually working with them in the very early stages of their capital programs to determine what they need, then being able to tailor our solutions to their needs. Also, as I mentioned, for those projects that require BAA or BABA-compliant products, some of that might be for municipalities, lighting within the roadways of America as well. We're able to deliver those type of product solutions as well within our lighting segment. Moving on to our maintenance and what we call managed service segment, this provides us a great base of recurring maintenance revenue. It also enables us to enjoy the sticky relationships that we have with customers, because we are in there day in and day out servicing their facilities, and then not only working on the maintenance, but their longer term capital planning as well.
Within this realm, we are providing preventative and reactive lighting, electrical services, which has been a growth opportunity for our company as well, and EV maintenance within this realm. We have a nationwide network of skilled and certified lighting and electrical professionals that enable us to scale our business and be reliable and dependable to those that we enjoy servicing. Our dedicated 24-hour response for emergency and non-emergency lighting and electrical issues. I did wanna touch upon here, within electrical issues, we have often discovered in many of our customers that when we've come to deliver a lighting solution for them, maybe their electrical systems are out of code, and this is where we have developed further relationships with our customers and being able to expand that revenue opportunity with them when we're doing electrical contracting type work as well.
We see that as a nice growth opportunity going forward. Within EV charging, about four years ago, we bought a company called Voltrek. They came to us with 15 years of EV expertise and experience. We are a premier reseller of leading EV charging stations, as I noted, ABB, InCharge, and ChargePoint. We are a full turnkey service provider, helping our customers with where to put their charging stations on their site, what hardware to use, what software to use as well. Within our years of experience, or I should say decades, we have 7,300 charging points under management, and then we're also helping maintain these charging systems, and that provides a great base of recurring revenue as well.
We've been a partner to many utilities as well for their make-ready programs, and we also have national coverage within our EV charging realm. I spoke a bit about our turnkey capabilities. Many might know Orion as a lighting provider, but really we bring so much more to our customers, and the service that we provide is our discreet and really bespoke turnkey capabilities, whether the projects are large or small.
We are working with our customers at the very early stages, helping them with a facility audit, what is needed, and then designing the product specifically to their specifications, manufacturing, whether it's in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, or through our global partners, and then coming through with the installation on time and on budget. We support our customers with what rebates are available, either through many of their utility providers.
We're helping them sort through that and also matching what product needs to be installed to maximize that rebate that they can get. We have a great warranty program, wrapping it around with maintenance as well. Because we do all of this, we have been able to enjoy being a preferred U.S. provider for many Fortune 100 and other global leaders in industries ranging anywhere from manufacturing to retail to logistics as well.
Here are some of the clients that we are proud to say have been our customers, many for decades. You can see a depth and breadth of the industries that we serve, anywhere from beverage companies, we have great relationships in the automotive field. The way we work with many of our automotive customers is year-over-year, their capital projects, they're planning with us.
We might do a specific section of their facilities, the next year we're going to do this section, the next year we're doing the following section. It provides really sticky relationships that we have with these customers and that we continue to plan years out in terms of their needs. We work within the realm of grocery, specialty distribution as well, such as US Foods, and we work with many government projects as well. We're proud to be a provider to many of these blue-chip customers for decades. I'll give you a case study here that really brings home what we do in lighting. We are working with Clarios. They're an OEM to the automotive industry, and they were looking to maximize energy savings, but also improve the visual environment for their workers.
This was a smaller facility, 100,000 sq ft, in Florence, Kentucky. As you can see from the picture, the before and after of not only the improvement for the environment that their workers were in, but just through installing 800 fixtures, they were able to enjoy close to $55,000 in annual energy cost reduction. One of the things that I really love about our business is that there's an inherent cost savings in ROI in everything that we do, along with reduction of their carbon footprint. In EV charging, most of our business we have focused on fleets and municipalities. Here is an example of a turnkey installation where we were there from the beginning, helping the Haverhill High School with their EV Transit vans.
We helped them with where to put these on site, and this was the ability to support their Ford E-Transit vans for transporting students with special needs. We were proud to partner with them. Projects like this and the management that we delivered these projects on time for the school district enabled us to win larger projects that you might have seen in the news, such as the Boston Public Schools system, where we have been a preferred provider of theirs as they are electrifying their entire fleet of school bus systems. We have won school bus yard after school bus yard, and a lot of that is because of our ability to deliver on time, on budget, and giving them the right solutions to maximize their EV charging footprint within their entire fleet of school buses.
In summary, how we achieve our mission is that we are really a one-source solution for LED and EV charging projects for our customers, with also an expansion of electrical contracting has really been a great growth opportunity for us. We provide substantial reduction in energy cost for LED projects. The average payback that our customers are seeing are anywhere between one and four years.
Our engineering team is consistently pushing the envelope and developing the highest lumen per watt performance in the industry. That is often a reason why we win many of these customers as well. Our flexible supply chain enables us to meet the customer's not only product needs from a timely basis, but cost as well. We continue to expand our product portfolio, including exterior products.
Recently, we came out with a TritonPro contractor line that hits a different price point, we could capture that market share as well. That's been a really successful product line for us. We have multiple go-to-market models, which enables us to have a diverse pipeline of revenue, we expanded into lighting maintenance services and electrical contracting as well. Here's our management team. I'm the CEO, with me today as well is Per Brodin, our CFO. Scott Green, who is not with us, he's busy running operations, has been with the company since 2013 when we acquired his company, Harris Lighting. I won't bore you with the eye chart here, I would like to say this morning, this is through our fiscal third quarter.
Our fourth quarter ended March 31st of 2026. That was our FY 2026. This morning we announced that we hit our guidance range. Our guidance range was between $84 million and $86 million. We hit the upper limit of $86 million. We were also announced positive adjusted EBITDA of $2 million and a significantly growing backlog of $30 million. At the end of December, when we last announced a backlog, it was at $20 million. We feel like we have a lot of momentum at the company and are looking forward to FY 2027, which started on April 1st, where we reiterated our guidance again of, I'll just call the mid-range of $95 million for next year. With that, I'll take any questions. Per's here as well. In the back?
Yeah. You said you work with different companies for the battery installation for the EV systems and putting those all together. Do you get any kind of reseller value on your end as well for recommendation of those systems to them? Do you guys actually retain ownership of those or, and then sublease them to the entity that you're installing for? Are you telling them to just purchase them and then you handle the installation?
For the specific battery energy storage systems, are you referring to those? Yeah. Yeah, also within EV charging, we don't manufacture those products. Some of the installations we do, we will purchase the products and install them. Other contracts that we have, we're there to install the products only. It depends on the various situations with the customers. We do have the capability to purchase those products, but sometimes the contract calls for just installation of them, and we don't own them.
You're not doing any kind of, like, rebate through or a relationship with the battery producer to refer their product and get, like, a little reseller fee? Is it just you're just passing that cost on directly and focusing on the installation portion of the, of the project, so it becomes a more one-off project?
Let me separate the two. In battery storage, we don't have any of those agreements yet, not to say that we wouldn't in the future. For EV charging systems, some projects are just a resell of the EV chargers as well. There are some that we have the right of the reoccurring revenue, a portion of that as well. We don't own them. We're not a operator of the charging stations. Okay.
I just wanna understand the margin profile. Have margins come down over the years? How do you get to bottom line profitability? Is it a scale issue, or is it more cost-cutting?
Yeah. I'll start. Per can join in. The past year, we did take about six and a half million out of the business. We feel that our business has been right-sized now for scale. With that, our margins improved. Some of the costs that came out was through redesign of products as well, that improved our margins as well. We think that we're at the right size now for scale and growth.
I'd say that some of that cost that came out of the business was to enhance gross margin. We've seen very nice gross margin improvement, which you can see, if you look at the TTM FY 2025 over TTM, you know, Q3 2026. We believe that that's sustainable and that as we continue to grow revenues, we'll be able to leverage the cost structure.
With the expectation of continuing to grow revenue, we think that we'll get very good flow-through on that, and we'll continue to You know, we've had six straight quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA. We expect to continue to expand on that, and that will continue to grow as we grow revenue.
Back to you.
Is there anything within the business model that allows you guys to have recurring revenue from, like, singular clients? Is it that because you guys are doing what you do, your clients just keep coming back for new and independent projects?
There's a mix there. Within our maintenance business is recurring revenue, and we don't count our maintenance business as well in the backlog. We have a $45 million three-year agreement with a major customer that provides maintenance. The other projects, it's not necessarily recurring, but we are meeting with them quarter after quarter, year after year to do this planning.
While it seems more like recurring, we don't characterize it as recurring. With the large automotive companies, there's multi-million dollar projects that continue to recur year-over-year. Sometimes they're larger, sometimes they're smaller, but it's the relationships and the execution of those projects. We don't look at it, characterize it as recurring.
Only the maintenance sector.
Yeah
of your business is the only recurring revenue that is what you guys are predictable income for you for the most part?
Pretty much. It varies slightly. I mean, our biggest customer in the maintenance segment is a retailer, and there are certain times that we are only allowed to, if you can imagine seasonality, we're not allowed in there to do preventative maintenance, so it falls back to reactive. When we look at it from a year standpoint, it's about $15 million in revenue.
What's the margin on that?
In 20-ish.
Mid-20s.
Yeah. Did you have a question up front?
Yeah. Real quick, just from a shareholder value perspective, if revenue and profitability continue to grow while the stock continues to, you know, fortunately languish, would you guys ever consider putting the company up for sale?
We're a public company. I guess inherently always have to look at those opportunities.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
You guys got into the EV space like 10 years ago.
Four years ago, we acquired a company that had been in the space.
What was the rationale behind that? It seems to me that the core business is lighting. Why did you guys decide to go that route?
Yeah. The core business is lighting, but 50%, round numbers, of our lighting business comes through the services and the installation, the turnkey installation. With EV, we saw a similar scenario where it's the installation to support the growing need for EV infrastructure. When we looked at our talent and what we do well in terms of project management, that is another project that we can install and deliver. That was the rationale. Three seconds. One last question? All right. Well, thanks for coming.