Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to SuperCom's first quarter 2026 financial results and corporate update conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Participants of this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the Internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes.
Joining me from SuperCom's leadership team is Ordan Trabelsi, SuperCom's President and Chief Executive Officer. I'd like to remind you that during this call, SuperCom management may be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address SuperCom's expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause SuperCom's actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, uncertainties and factors, please refer to the risk factors described in SuperCom's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 20-F and Form 6-K, and SuperCom's press release that accompanies this call, particularly the cautionary statements in it. Today's conference call includes EBITDA and non-GAAP financial measures that SuperCom believes can be useful in evaluating its performance. You should not consider this additional information in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP.
For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to net loss, a comparable GAAP financial measure, please see the reconciliation table located in SuperCom's earnings press release that accompanies this call. Reconciliations for other non-GAAP financial measures and comparable GAAP financial measures are available there as well. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, May 14, 2026. Except as required by law, SuperCom disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to SuperCom's President and CEO, Ordan Trabelsi.
Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining today. Since we just had an earnings conference call two weeks ago, we're gonna keep today's call shorter with a brief overview of business financials and then open up for a Q&A. For those of you who are new to SuperCom, we provide electronic monitoring and public safety technology for local and national governments around the world. For over three decades, we have partnered with national governments across the globe to deliver secure, scalable, and innovative technology solutions. In recent years, our focus has shifted sharply towards criminal justice, where we leverage our proprietary PureSecurity product suite, where we invested over $45 million for offender electronic monitoring, including domestic violence prevention technology and alcohol detection through lightweight ankle bracelets with extraordinarily long battery life and other connected monitoring device and capabilities.
Two weeks ago, we reported our financials for fiscal year 2025, which reflected the completion of a very successful four-year transformation, representing a compounded annual growth rate in revenues of approximately 30% in our electronic monitoring business and a CAGR of approximately 47% in company EBITDA, reaching an annual 2025 EBITDA level of $9.4 million from $2 million in 2021. We also reduced our debt in this period by approximately 45% and lowered our blended interest rate from double digits to slightly below 6%, as well as increased our cash and short-term deposit balance to over $12 million.
Entering 2026, we are pleased to begin with record gross profit, record operating income, and record EBITDA of $3.3 million for the first quarter of the year, reflecting continued execution across our business and the scalability of our recurring revenue model. We continue expanding in Europe with two new national contracts, including a new $17 million national contract from Sweden's Ministry of Justice. At the same time, our U.S. electronic monitoring technology annualized recurring revenue or ARR run rate has expanded by over 180% year-over-year from May 2025, reflecting the accelerated impact of a rapid deployment and expanding customer footprint across the U.S.
Year-over-year, financial highlights from our Q1 report compared to the same period last year are summarized as follows: Revenue increased 8% to $7.6 million from $7.05 million. Gross profit increased 8% to $4.8 million from $4.5 million, an over 10-year record. Gross margin remained robust at slightly above 63%. Operating income increased to $1.23 million from $1.21 million, another over 10-year record. Excluding the extraordinary financial gains of $4.1 million recorded in Q1 2025, our GAAP net income surged to $1.33 million in Q1 2026 from $0.1 million in Q1 2025. These gains are related to conversions of debt to equity and negotiated premium prices of up to $43 per share done in Q1 2025.
Excluding the extraordinary financial gains of $4.8 million and recorded in Q1 2025 again, non-GAAP net income surged 155% to $2.78 million in Q1 2026 from $1.1 million in Q1 2025. EBITDA increased 32% to $3.34 million from $2.53 million, another over 10-year record. GAAP EPS was roughly $0.24. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.51. Cash and cash equivalents increased $11 million, and book value of equity increased to $45.6 million from $43.5 million at the end of 2025. As you notice, significant improvements to profitability. I wanna give a brief, some more color on the what's driving this profitability.
Beyond the clear benefits from economies of scale and operating leverage, our improvements in profitability are being driven also by the following. Firstly, consolidation of activities in Europe. As you know, our projects in Europe are in many different countries, and historically, we would team up with a local partner who would handle the training, the language, the on-country presence, the deployment on on-premise services and others. We continue to consolidate and centralize our operations in Europe. We established a central European hub in Romania for logistics, equipment handling, shipments, and RMA. We're also expanding our scope by taking over more IT and more support responsibilities directly, reducing our reliance on local partners and improving our margins. We now provide also our own 24/7 multi-tiered technology support across projects. Centralizing these functions is significantly improving margins across contracts.
We're also leveraging AI to accelerate development, introduce new automations, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs across development and customer operations. Our new products and technology advances can reduce costs dramatically, given improved architectures requiring less labor in replacement, support, and other processes that overhead the cost for our business. Our expansion to the U.S. The expansion to the U.S. market is in itself an improvement to profitability because everything is centralized through the cloud in English and usually consisting of simple product mix as opposed to Europe, which has a lot of different products, project deployment, and language complexities in the national projects. As we enter and grow U.S. electronic monitoring technology revenues, more profitability is expected to improve. Our U.S. growth and expansion was one of the central developments in recent years.
Since mid-2024, we have signed more than 40 new electronic monitoring contracts. Entered 60 new states and built 17 new service provider partnerships. There's an inherent lag between the contract signing and revenue recognition. In some of these contracts, it takes up to six months or more to fully deploy since they have to swap out their existing units, and this could take time. Sometimes they just swap out organically to avoid the installer overhead, such that every new offender is put on SuperCom technology and as existing offenders end their monitoring terms, the incumbent provider's tech is returned and replaced by SuperCom's technology for the next offender with the same unit. Hence, when we announce new projects in 2024 or 2025, there's a lag until you see it.
In 2026, in Q1, we've seen this nice growth in ARR, which continues to improve as the months go by in the year. We're experiencing acceleration in our expansion numbers here. Our SuperCom's electronic monitoring technology quarterly recurring revenues for the first quarter in the U.S. increased approximately 88% just for the whole first quarter. While as of May 2026, the annualized recurring revenue run rate grew by over 180% compared to May 2025. As you may have noticed, the majority of our revenues are still coming from the EMEAR region, Europe, Israel, and a lot of our projects there are from the over 15 national project wins that we have announced in recent years. They provide a strong base for continued growth.
With an active and growing pipeline of mean-meaningful opportunities, the customer relationships are very sticky. In our expansion, we displaced very long-term incumbents, such as a 25-year incumbent in Sweden, and over 20-year incumbents in Israel and Germany. Also successfully entered brand new EM countries like Romania, where we won the country's first electronic monitoring contract with initial value of over $33 million in 2022. In Sweden, we recently won a national project with initial value over $17 million, with substantial opportunity for expansion beyond that. This brings us to over $25 million in aggregate initial value of contracts we won in Sweden in electronic monitoring.
Several years back, we started off with projects of $100,000 in between Latvia, and since then we've been growing in scale to $3.6 million in Finland, another $7 million in Sweden, another $17 million in Sweden, $33 million in Romania. As we go up the ladder, we hope to win larger and larger opportunities. We know that, in the market there are many out there, including an opportunity that we're expecting to come up in Italy for expected at over $20 million and an opportunity over GBP 150 million expected to come out the initial RFP sometime in 2027. With that, we'd like to turn the call over to operator for any questions from our participants at this time.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question on today's call, you will need to press star, then the number one on your telephone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before entering your request and speaking on the call. If your question has been answered and you wish to withdraw your request, you may do so by pressing star two. One moment please, while we poll for questions. The first question today will be from Matthew Galinko from Maxim Group. Matthew, your line is live.
Hey, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe firstly.
Can you expand a little bit on what the competitive environment looks like today and winning, you know, clearly a lot in the U.S. and Europe. You know, are you seeing anybody new or, you know, can you go over what's, you know, supporting your ability to, you know, win these greenfield opportunities and displace the incumbents?
Hey, Matthew, great question. We just announced four new county wins contracts in New York. We displaced three incumbents. These are established industry veterans. There's still roughly 10 players in the industry globally. There's high barriers to entry. You can't enter if you haven't shown experience and references for five, 10 years in the industry. That keeps the industry kind of barriered even though it continues to grow. We displaced three different incumbents, usually we score much higher on the technology. In Europe, we're doing this on a national level with long-term evaluation processes, which took months and months. In the U.S., a lot of it is through live demos and trials. They take our equipment, they run it, they compare it to what they have.
As you saw, we had 100% conversion on these four opportunities that we faced in New York and many others around the U.S. We have very high conversion rates, and we believe it's 'cause of our technology and our good track record. In New York, for example, we had an initial county give very strong references to these four new counties. We're doing good work, good deployments. Those references are coming to new customers. That, together with the trial demos and the technology capabilities, are helping us win new projects in the U.S. and in Europe. Can I remind you that in Europe, we had over 65% win rate in RFPs. In the U.S., in a lot of these direct counties, we're even seeing higher numbers than that. It's still early on.
We'll see how this rolls out for the rest of our expansion into the U.S. market.
Thanks. I think you shared a 180% growth rate in ARR for the U.S. market. Can you just mention whether that includes or excludes services delivered by LCA? Or is that purely from the new, you know, initiative in the U.S.?
It's a great question. In the U.S. as you might remember, we have a lot of our revenues coming from California from our LCA business. What's new in the recent year and a half, is us providing our PureSecurity technology through customers in the U.S. These increases in ARR numbers are of that technology. SuperCom's ARR technology, SuperCom's electronic monitoring technology. ARR are not the recurring revenues of LCA, which have been running for many years, which include auto services as well. This is only for EM technology.
Great.
Yeah.
Okay. That, I appreciate that. That's helpful. Maybe one last question from me, then I'll jump back in the queue. You highlighted a couple of the large European national programs that are coming up for bid. Can you talk about how SuperCom is maybe positioned differently from the last time these programs were up for bid? Do you think you have a stronger chance of winning them this time around?
It's a great question. In England, the project is very large. As I said before, we're expecting it to come out next year at a very large budget. In the past, we competed for this, and we didn't win first place, even though we did do well on a lot of the scoring. Some of the things that we dealt with was our weak balance sheet and financial position, and low references. Back then, we had less references, and also other vendors tried to point to the fact that the company had maybe only a few million dollars of cash, a market cap of $4 million, a lot of debt at high interest rates, and the stability of the company was at question. Today, our balance sheet is much stronger.
We have a much larger reference base. The company is much more stable. We have a lot of cash on hand. I think it'll make it much easier this time around with that England opportunity. There's many other ones, like we said, Italy and other countries we haven't entered yet. As we continue to deploy more projects in Europe, we not only continue to deploy more projects in those regions like we saw in Sweden, it's the fourth contract already, but we also increase our opportunity and our capability to win other projects in other regions in Europe. Similarly, as we're gonna be seeing in the U.S. as well.
Thank you. Once again, it will be star one on your phone at this time if you wish to ask a question on today's call. That's star 1 if you wish to ask a question. The next question is coming from Greg Mesniaeff from Kingswood Capital. Greg, your line is live.
Thank you. Hi, Ordan. Two quick questions. Can you share with us the percentage of your revenues in the first quarter that came from the U.S. and how that has trended versus last year?
I don't have the exact percentages, but it's been similar to what you see on the annual report. The U.S. is still much smaller than Europe because of the project size. The numbers coming from the SuperCom technology are growing very fast, and that's if that growth continues, of course, the U.S. will be much more substantial. We expect over time the U.S. to actually grow past Europe because the market in the U.S. is $1.8 billion by 2028 compared to the $300 million in Europe.
Great. Can you give us an update on the Romania situation?
Can you elaborate when you say on the Romania situation?
Well, you had a, you know, quite a bit of business there, is that still continuing at the same-
Okay.
-you know, run rate, or has it slowed down temporarily?
Great. Great. We won the Romania project in 2022, over $33 million. Like in many projects, when we do good work, the deployment is faster than originally expected, and they deployed relatively fast and ordered a lot of units. Last year there was a decline from that specific customer, and we described it that without that decline, the growth last year would've been approximately 40% for the business because everything else that was happening. Romania this year continues to work. We're getting new orders right now, and we'll see at what size those orders will come out through for the year. But it's still active customers of ours and satisfied customer. The ordering levels can move around based on their own needs.
Like we've seen with any other customers that we either displaced or that we have for many years, once you have a customer, they stay with you. If you're doing a good job, they stay with you for a very long time and continue to order more units and add more programs and more capabilities. Right now, we have been receiving orders from Romania, and we're supplying them as we speak. We're working on supplying those orders.
Ordan, when you get follow-on orders, I'm assuming the margin profile is better. Is that right?
Yes. It's a great point. As we progress within any project, as we progress further and further, the margins are better. A lot of the projects we have today are later stage, and that's why you're seeing improved profitability in general. At the beginning, you have a lot of training, installations, and developments, and adjustments and loading the server farms, and then afterwards, just additional units with high contribution margins. That's why it's so interesting, the U.S. market, cause in a way, it's one deployment on the cloud in English. Even though it's different counties and different regions, it's all on the same platform and has a higher gross margin, and it's all charged, you know, per unit per day. In essence, it's easier to track in a consistent manner.
It's much more diversified. We're very excited about the expansion to the U.S.
Got it. Thanks, Ordan.
Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude our Q&A session today. At this time, I will pass the call back to Ordan for closing remarks. Okay, please pause. We just got a couple more questions in. The next question is coming from Song Lim from Sapient Investments. Song, your line is live.
Hi, Ordan. Thanks for taking my call. Given the AI, how AI has been impacting the tech industry, could you give us more color on how it has impacted your company and your industry?
Right. I did share on the prepared remarks that we're using AI also in our ongoing operations in development, logistics, in our processes. It's helping improve profitability. Also, we've been integrating AI into our technology offerings, and that's at a various stage in its life cycle. We gave one update a couple years back, and we plan to give another update on this. That's also something that through our offerings, we plan to also leverage the power of AI for some meaningful things, and we'll give future updates on that.
Thanks. I noticed that I only have annual figures for your free cash flow or your cash flow numbers. But not on a quarterly basis. I've realized that in the past couple of financial years, free cash flow has been negative, and I think operating cash flow as well. Could you give us more color on that with regard to cash flows going forward?
Yes. Yes. Regarding cash flows, it depends on the mix of projects. You'll see when we had projects like Romania, producing the majority of the revenues because of the nature of purchase there, higher cash flows, but margins are lower than other projects like in the U.S. where it's recurring revenue and you're manufacturing more and receiving cash over time. There's a mix, and based on the revenue mix, you'll see a shift in cash use and profitability margins.
Thank you. Once again, if there will be any further questions at this time, please press star one on your phone. That's star one if you wish to ask any other questions. Okay. There were no other questions at this time. At this time, I'll hand the call back to Ordan for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. I wanna thank all of you also for participating in today's call and for your interest in SuperCom. We look forward to sharing our progress on our next conference calls, filings, and press releases. Thank you very much, and have a good day.
Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.