Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the York Space Systems fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question- and- answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Christopher Evenden, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to York Space Systems fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. With me on the line are Dirk Wallinger, our CEO, and Kevin Messerle, our CFO. Please note that our earnings press release is available at ir.yorkspacesystems.com. In addition, we have posted an earnings presentation to accompany our prepared remarks on the same website. Lastly, after the call, we will post a transcript of our prepared remarks and an audio replay of this call. For those listening to the rebroadcast of this call, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, Thursday, March 19th, 2026, and have not been updated subsequent to this call. During this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release.
We will also make statements that are considered forward-looking, including those related to our 2026 outlook, future growth prospects, backlog, growth of market share, growth strategy, capabilities, and future health of our spacecraft. Listeners are cautioned that our forward-looking statements involve certain assumptions and are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause our actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. We advise listeners to review the risk factors and other discussions included in our prospectus filed with the SEC on January 30th, 2026, and in our subsequent reports filed with the SEC, including our upcoming annual report on Form 10-K for the year 2025. After the completion of our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Now I'll turn the call over to Dirk.
Thanks, Chris. Hello and welcome to York's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. I appreciate you all taking the time, and I'm happy to be speaking with you. 2025 marked an inflection point in our business. We grew revenue by 52% year- over- year, and we exited the year with clear line of sight to profitability in 2026. Kevin will go to the details of that in a moment. Our financial results are a reflection of the business milestones we reached during the year. Given this is our first earnings call, I will provide some context on how we got here. I founded York in 2012 with one purpose, to disrupt the traditional space industry.
At that time, it was an era of multi-billion dollar satellites built over decade-long timelines, and it was clear to me that if the United States continued on this path, we'd lose the second space race to our adversaries. We needed the ability to design, build, and deploy large constellations of satellites on significantly accelerated timelines. That meant transforming how we manufacture, launch, and operate satellites, shifting from bespoke programs to a fully industrialized model. That's exactly what York was built to do and what we've been executing on since 2012. As the mission prime, we own the full satellite lifecycle from design and manufacturing through launch, operations, and sustainment. Our multi-platform approach is built around a standardized modular family of spacecraft that range from 200 kg to more than 2,000 kg.
We architect our platforms as integrated systems, combining flight-proven hardware with proprietary flight and mission operations software. That integrated software hardware approach is designed to allow us to seamlessly coordinate across three different operation centers, task across our global network of close to 50 antennas, and procure and integrate launch services. Executing as the mission prime enables us to monetize the full mission lifecycle and maintain control over most of the aspects required to execute our vision. That integrated approach is what has set York apart and what has enabled us to deliver reliably at speed and scale. 2025 saw us deliver on that founding vision. We launched 23 satellites into orbit in 2025 alone. We emerged as a leading provider of the Department of Defense's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, measured by spacecraft on orbit, number of contracts, and mission types.
We acquired a global ground station network and software-defined operations platform, effectively eliminating ground communication bottlenecks to support our end-to-end mission architecture. We fine-tuned our industrialized production process with every satellite we build. We've achieved multiple technical feats, including in-plane, cross-vendor, and space to ground optical laser communications. York demonstrated K-band connectivity, orbit maneuvering, and remains the only provider ever to demonstrate Link 16 from space to ground. Together, these demonstrations validate our ability to integrate advanced capabilities into cohesive, secure architectures designed to meet the evolving needs of the warfighter. These milestones reflect years of deliberate execution and sustained intentional investment. From the outset, we've aligned every major decision around enabling the rapid, cost-effective production and operation of satellite constellations critical to U.S. mission success. With U.S. government demand accelerating rapidly, we are positioned to deliver at scale.
Our IPO strengthened our capital base and operational flexibility, enabling us to accelerate execution and further extend our lead over competitors. Now, I'd like to highlight the 2025 achievements that we expect to have the biggest impact on our future. Most significantly, on September 10th, we launched 21 satellites for the Department of Defense. This low Earth orbit constellation is designed to provide secure, resilient communications and data transport for U.S. and Allied warfighters. We delivered our satellites to orbit one month ahead of our nearest competitor, and we confirmed the health of all spacecraft within hours of launch separation through our own classified Mission Operations Center here in Denver. We are excited about the launch of our second plane of satellites for Tranche 1.
These spacecraft were the first operational communication satellites in orbit for the PWSA, and we understand they will play a key role in communications infrastructure underpinning America's next generation of space-based defense systems. Our multi-platform approach enables us to execute across nearly every Golden Dome mission set, including communications, signals intelligence, remote proximity operations, Earth observation, synthetic aperture radar, and visible imaging. Our S-CLASS platform launched in 2018 and has flown across multiple missions and constellations, establishing a repeatable flight-proven foundation. We expanded that architecture with our LX-CLASS platform, which shares approximately 80% of its hardware and nearly all of its software with the S-CLASS. That design commonality validated our manufacturing model and reinforces the strength of our integrated hardware and software ecosystem.
Building on that foundation, we introduced our largest M-CLASS platform in 2025, extending the same core architecture to support payloads in excess of 8 kW of power. By leveraging the same flight-proven hardware and software stack, M-CLASS enables us to scale into higher power mission sets without redesigning the underlying system. This significantly broadens our addressable market across national security, civil, and commercial markets. As part of our plan to continue expanding our share of the market, I am happy to share that we recently finalized a $187 million commercial contract for a 20+ satellite constellation built on the M-CLASS platform. This is our fifth commercial contract and the first constellation of a series of constellations for this customer. Our platform and turnkey ecosystem approach is designed to lower costs, streamline and de-risk procurement, accelerate build times, and significantly reduce capital intensity.
Recognizing that ground infrastructure is foundational to proliferated architectures, we acquired ATLAS Space Operations in the third quarter of 2025. As proliferated constellations scale, ground infrastructure becomes a critical constraint. The pressure is particularly acute when dozens of satellites are deployed simultaneously at launch and require rapid checkout and orbital phasing, as was the case with our numerous constellation launches. By bringing ATLAS into our ecosystem, we expanded our global ground network, reduced dependency on constrained third-party capacity, and reinforced our integrated end-to-end mission model, enhancing space to ground resilience. ATLAS was essential in enabling us to confirm the health of 21 satellites launched in September quickly. As a wholly owned subsidiary, ATLAS will continue to operate independently under its existing brand, serving its diverse portfolio of customers across the industry. Another key mission in 2025 was Dragoon.
Launched in June, Dragoon is notable because we went from contract execution to orbit in just 7 months, a 75% reduction in delivery timeline versus a typical 30-month program. York was approached with an identified agency need, and we then reallocated a satellite in production to this mission. We integrated a completely new capability and delivered the spacecraft in orbit successfully. York is probably one of maybe two providers which have demonstrated this ability. Another milestone in 2025 was our commercially procured communications mission for NASA. The BARD mission, developed in collaboration with NASA's Space Communications and Navigation Program and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, executed more than 100 on-orbit communication activities. BARD successfully demonstrated forward and return link connectivity to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, validating interoperability across multiple commercial K-band relay networks.
These demonstrations confirmed the feasibility of seamless roaming between government and commercial communication services. BARD is an important opportunity as a potential pathfinder for modernizing NASA's legacy TDRS architecture into a proliferated LEO network. Such a transition would expand connectivity, reduce latency, and enable faster commercial pace technology refresh cycles while preserving compatibility for existing users and unlocking new mission capabilities. We anticipate the BARD mission to be extended to address an expanded series of demonstrations, further showcasing our large customer base and wide mission capabilities. In addition to our mission execution, we also strengthened our strategic position in January by going public. Our decision to go public was grounded in long-term strategy and informed by a clear assessment of market timing and growth trajectory.
The capital we've raised provides us flexibility to seek opportunities to grow our TAM through M&A and adjacent market products, grow inventory to provide unmatched scheduled deliveries, expand the manufacturing advantage we currently have over our competitors, and scale our network ecosystem. Our recent acquisition of Orbion Space Technology is a good example of the first point. Orbion is a Michigan-based manufacturer of flight-proven electrical propulsion systems that has already delivered at scale for York missions. Acquiring the company helps us reduce supply chain risk, which improves schedule certainty and enables us to align our technology roadmaps with the growing constellation scale demands across the sector. Similar to ATLAS, Orbion will continue to operate as a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of York, serving customers across the broad space industry.
Both acquisitions reinforce our deliberate strategy to integrate critical mission capabilities across York's space ecosystem, propulsion, ground operations, and end-to-end mission execution. Future M&A may address strategic elements of the supply chain. Some may help us grow our TAM. Some may do both. The second use of proceeds will be to build inventory of our satellite platforms. We demonstrated the velocity of our manufacturing process in September by being first to orbit for the PWSA Tranche 1 contract. We demonstrated we can reduce in-orbit delivery by up to 75% with inventoried spacecraft. We are one of the very few in the industry with proven platforms mature enough in their life cycle to provide this capability. This presents a significant strategic competitive advantage and can also enable us to recognize revenue on accelerated schedules.
Our time to orbit was already a differentiator, one we built through over a decade of manufacturing satellites. We believe the ability to leverage existing platform inventory provides a step function improvement, further widening the gap between us and our competitors. Demand signals are very encouraging. The government is currently re-engaging, and the Pentagon is moving quickly to execute their missions. We believe there is a clear understanding across the government that the global threat environment is deteriorating. That investment in space domain awareness, missile defense, connectivity, and counter space capabilities are essential to America's security. Proliferated architectures have become the preferred approach for resiliency and fight through capability.
We are also seeing a pronounced push to diversify supplier bases in other areas of the market as cost and speed take on greater importance, especially as proliferation is only feasible if satellites can be made affordably enough to deploy in large quantities. York's 2025 performance metrics validate the mission I set when I founded the company. From day one, our goal has been to serve as a mission prime for proliferated systems. Today, we've built the foundation, scalable satellite manufacturing, a unified software stack across platforms, and an integrated space-terrestrial ecosystem. Today, York is executing at scale across national security and commercial missions, with 33 satellites currently on orbit. Mission operations centers supporting five active missions and two operational constellations. We are preparing for our eighth launch overall, which will see another 21 York satellites reach orbit on a fully dedicated launch vehicle for the second time.
We are executing on our 12th contract and advancing work on our sixth constellation contract, underscoring York's ability to deliver repeated, reliable performance across multiple programs while continuing to scale production and mission execution capacity. York's proven mass production cadence demonstrates its strong competitive advantages, enabling the company to field multiple flight-proven platforms with decades of flight heritage demonstrated on-orbit performance and the ability to deliver fully populated launches at scale. Our latest commercial constellation contract win further demonstrates York's ability to win across numerous markets and customers. For all these reasons, we believe York is well-positioned to meet the evolving needs of the United States government and commercial customers. With that, I hand the call over to Kevin.
Thanks, Dirk. As Dirk said, 2025 was a transformative year for York. By successfully delivering on a broad set of contracts, we were able to significantly grow revenue and take significant strides towards profitability. Revenue for the year was $386.2 million, up $132.7 million or 52% on the prior year. Substantially all of our revenue derives from long-term fixed firm price contracts and is recognized using a percentage of completion method. We believe this approach most accurately tracks the business, and it provides generally a steady progression of revenue throughout a program. Year-over-year growth in revenue was primarily driven by increased completion against two of our transport layer Tranche 2 contracts.
Gross margin percentage, which includes allocated labor, overheads, and D&A, was 20%, up 7 percentage points year-on-year, driven by improved mix as newer programs became a larger part of the whole and a reduction in negative EAC adjustments. EAC is estimate at completion and is our estimate of final program costs and margins. We have built cross-functional teams at York that reevaluate these on a program-by-program basis every quarter. Turning to operating expenses, while our revenues increased 52% year-on-year, our SG&A plus R&D expenses only increased 8% for the same period. We also incurred approximately $12.1 million of one-time transaction costs associated with our M&A program, as well as IPO-related professional fees. The ability to scale our revenue while tightly controlling expenses is the primary driver of our improvement in adjusted EBITDA from 2024 - 2025.
We expect that trend to continue through 2026. On the operations front, we had 710 employees at the end of the quarter, of whom almost 75% are directly involved in the design and manufacture of satellites or delivery of mission services. Just to touch on our liquidity, as of December 31st, 2025, our cash and cash equivalents were $162.6 million, and availability under our revolving facility was $150 million for total liquidity of $312.6 million. On January 30th, 2026, we completed our IPO of 18.5 million shares of our common stock at a public offering price of $34 per share.
We received net proceeds of $582.6 million, net of underwriting discounts and commissions and offering costs, bringing our total liquidity at January 31st to $895.2 million. We make use of a number of non-GAAP metrics to inform our management of the business and to give investors insight into our core business drivers. These include contribution margin and adjusted EBITDA. We define contribution margin as revenue less material costs. Historically, 85%-90% of our direct costs for a program, excluding overhead allocations and D&A, have been material costs.
It is incredibly important for us to price our contracts at a healthy margin above our single largest cost, material cost. We target a 35% contribution margin on all new business. Contribution margin in 2025 was 32%, an increase of 2 percentage points from 2024's 30%. We don't disclose program-level margins, but I will broadly say that margins on our newer programs have been quite a bit higher than our older programs. We attribute this improvement to our increased ability to project material costs based on years of experience with actual production runs, together with a more rigorous pricing process that includes the use of appropriate management reserves. To further reduce margin risks, just as we operate under firm fixed-price contracts, we largely hold our suppliers to the same.
We grew contribution margin dollars by $47 million in 2025 to $122 million, an increase of 63%. Loss per share was $0.89 for the year. Capital expenditures for 2025 were $8.9 million, as compared to $18 million in 2024. As Dirk touched on in his remarks, our manufacturing process is highly flexible and very efficient, and this has enabled us to keep CapEx very low by the standards of the industry. Turning briefly to the quarter, revenue for Q4 was $105 million, up 38% on Q4 2024. Gross profit margin was 20%. Operating expenses were $38.2 million. Contribution margin was 33%. Adjusted EBITDA was -$1.4 million, up from -$4 million last year.
Looking ahead, we expect revenue for the year to be in the range of $545 million-$595 million, up 48% year-over-year at the midpoint. Over 70% of this is expected to come from our existing backlog, with the remainder anticipated to come from new business in the back half of the year. With regards to new business, our current expectation is for government contracts to start to be awarded towards the middle of the year, and York intends to compete strongly for them. Now I'll hand it back over to the operator for questions. Operator?
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of John Godyn of Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Appreciate it. I wanted to. There are a few things to follow up on, but I guess the one that I'll focus on is this acquisition, Orbion. Maybe you could just talk a little bit more about that, how it came about, what the terms were. I was curious if this was the deal that was contemplated in the S-1. There was a note in the S-1 about, you know, a letter of intent for an acquisition. Was this that, or was it a different one?
Yeah, sure. Happy to dive into that one a little bit. Thanks, John. I appreciate the question. Yes, it is the acquisition that we were contemplating from the S-1. We're really excited about Orbion for a few different reasons. You know, we've launched a good amount of satellites at this point. We've worked with a wide range of propulsion providers. Orbion was really a clear winner as far as their ability to execute, their ability to perform. Their hardware has performed really well in orbit. It's a really great team to work with, so we're excited about bringing that on. It kinda goes to the vision of, you know, when we were doing the IPO, right?
We spoke about the four different things that we were gonna do and how we're gonna go on offense, and one of those was some inorganic associated with bringing great technologies kinda in-house so we could align our technology roadmap. Kinda give them a better vision of where the market was headed, where we were headed, so that they could be more successful in developing those products kinda right out the gate.
That kind of communications is gonna be critical because, you know, we're already a leader as far as cost and schedule go. With Orbion, with us now, we'll be able to align that technology roadmap, give them assurance of the kinda size of production cadence they're gonna need in the coming years, so that they'll be really prepared to deliver for us. They've been a phenomenal performer for us for years now. We think this will make them an even better performer for us and the rest of the market as well. They will continue to execute as a wholly owned subsidiary.
That's fantastic. Do you guys, are you willing to give us a sense of how much revenue that's contributing to this year? Then just, you know, on M&A in general, are there any other acquisitions contemplated that we should be aware of? Thanks.
Yeah. Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, I don't think that we're breaking out them individually, right? I think it's we're gonna still report at the top level, right? I'm not sure.
Yeah. That's right. We're not issuing specific guidance, John, on Orbion, but we can confirm that it's included in our consolidated guidance figure.
To the latter question about, you know, additional M&A, I mean, you know, I do think there's some opportunity for some additional M&A. I think, you know, people in the industry and in the segment kinda see what we're doing. They're very excited about it. They wanna be a part of it. You know, there'll be some other things where, l ike Orbion, they make sense, right? They're the best technologies. It will help us continue to drive down costs even further, and make that advantage that we have larger. Also, kind of align that so that our schedules continue to be the best in the sector. So I think there could be some more opportunity for that. There's also opportunities where, you know, we might start to look at kind of adjacent markets and things like that.
Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Seth Seifman of JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks very much, and good afternoon. I wanted to start off talking about some of the opportunities for new business that you mentioned coming later in the year. Is it some of the Golden Dome opportunities moving maybe to the left of initial expectations for 2027? Is it in the intelligence community? Is it the next tracking layer? And what are the prospects to exit this year with, you know, a backlog that's bigger than where it is now?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that we feel pretty great about that, Seth, so I appreciate the question. You know, I thought the pretty exciting part of the call was where we mentioned that we just won a new constellation for our M-CLASS, for a commercial customer, 20+ constellation. It's the first constellation of many planned for this customer. I thought that was an exciting part. I thought that that would add to the backlog. So, you know, obviously that's pretty exciting for us as well. As you know, General Guetlein has kind of attested to and been more public in general with regard to Golden Dome and national defense just in general.
I mean, it's got, y ou know, everyone focuses on the name Golden Dome, but the reality is it's national defense, right? Independent of what it's called. He's spoken a lot more about the need, the absolute need to lower the cost, to move faster, and then to leverage existing acquisition vehicles. We check the box on all three of those. I think that's why we're starting to see a little bit more come out about national defense and Golden Dome, what that's gonna be. I can't go into any more details right now other than to say that it's a late-breaking news that we have not won one, but we've won two IDIQ contracts now for different classified customers.
You know, on this call alone, we have not only our healthy backlog and our ability to convert that backlog into revenue, which Kevin reported on, we've won a new commercial contract for the first of many constellations for our M-CLASS. And then we have now won two IDIQs for different classified customers. We feel very bullish about the position that we're in. I think generally though, I mean, just as a commentary, you're not gonna hear a ton about Golden Dome. General Guetlein has been pretty clear that most of the work's gonna be classified, and that's kind of what we're seeing, right? We're seeing contracts being awarded on the classified side of things.
I'd be happy to talk more about those contracts that we've won for the different classified customers, but that'll be kinda coming in the next few weeks as we kinda sketch those out in a little bit more detail and what we're allowed to discuss and what we're not. We're still working on that. Hopefully that gives you more insight. I mean, I think that we're in a pretty bullish position with our performance and our ability to, you know, just between IPO and now, we've already added quite a bit more to the backlog. I think we feel like we're in a good position, and we're gonna execute like we always do.
Yeah. Excellent. Maybe to follow up then on the commercial win there. I guess, you know, the pieces of the TAM that you guys have laid out in the past were pretty national security-oriented. How do we think about that commercial piece coming into it, and how, you know, maybe the size of that relative to the other pieces of the TAM, and, you know, how significant that could get within your mix?
Yeah, I mean, I feel you know focus historically has been on national defense, but that's mostly been because you know the reality is that's where the dollars were, that's where the contracts were. We won the contracts that were available to us. We did a very good job on them and then executing on them as well. That success led to more contracts. You know, we're happy with that. But I'm more and more bullish every day on what commercial can do. You know, unfortunately, we can't disclose who that customer is right now, but I'm very excited about the mission and what they're doing.
It's very much aligned with the trends that we're seeing today and also what I think we're gonna see is a lot more growth in this area. Really, you know, traditionally, commercial has kind of struggled with kind of getting that kind of total gravity, I guess, for lack of a better term, on, you know, really garnering the attention it needs and the dollars it needs to really be at scale. We're really seeing that shift. We're also seeing this administration say that they wanna leverage more commercial, which obviously encourages investment in it as well. You know, I'm in hopes this is the first of many. I mean, I know for this customer alone, this is the first of many in the constellations that they're gonna deliver to orbit.
We're obviously very happy to be in the position with that. I think in general, commercial, we're just gonna see more and more. The nice part is you kind of have a giant surge in national defense, right? Which is a great market for us, and we're now, you know, showing some pretty significant diversity in customer base on that front. To have some big commercial wins is really great too. I think both markets are gonna surge. Obviously, I think that we're in a good position to win that work. We just gotta continue to execute as we have been, deliver at scale. I think both of those markets are gonna see healthy growth for many years to come. No one's saying we need less satellites in the future.
Excellent. Thanks very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Arment of Baird. Your line is open. Please, go ahead.
Yeah, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Kevin and Dirk. Thanks for your time. Hey, Dirk, just to circle back a little bit on your comments about kind of Golden Dome /n ational defense contracts. We're dealing with a lot of investors who are kind of very focused on if there's been a material change in what you view the PWSA kind of architecture is. I was wondering if you could just maybe shed light. Do you view it to be materially changing, or is it just morphing into the various classified versions of Golden Dome? Just any insight would be helpful. Thanks.
I think it's along the lines of what you said in the latter part there. You know, look, if it's called PWSA, if it's called Space Data Network, if it's called pLEO, you know, whatever the name is, the government is definitively moving towards it. They're delivering contracts pretty quickly now, out to performers who are gonna execute on this. They need this executed really quickly. I don't think it's about, you know, "Hey, does PWSA, is that going away? Is MILNET going away?" There's nothing going away. Communications is not only absolutely critical for Golden Dome and national defense in general, it's the most important thing. Nothing else happens without communication.
I think it's more of there's definitely a realization that this is going to be the architecture of the future for the United States. If it is gonna be the architecture for the United States, that it needs to be more coordinated, right? That's a general theme that we're hearing across anything, whether that's space, whether that's sea, land, air, it has to be more coordinated. I think a lot of the shifts, quote unquote, shifts, I guess, that you're seeing in PWSA transport or MILNET or what have you, isn't really about, do we need this? It is about, we do need this. How are we gonna get them to talk to one another?
Maybe we should look at that in more detail and definitize that more, before we continue on kind of separate disparate paths, which is kind of what got us into the challenges the United States faces today, that is, we have lots of amazing capabilities, but they're disparate, and they don't talk to one another. I think it's really more about that, you know, whatever the name is, it doesn't matter. It's needed. I think it's just more about let's make sure that they're gonna talk to one another because we've shot ourselves in the foot, like, a couple times over this, so let's not do that anymore. I think it's really more about that. Like, that's the mentality.
Got it. That's helpful color. Just it is exciting, obviously, with the new commercial win that you announced in February. Could you maybe talk a little bit about expectations of delivery of those, 20+ satellites, just over what timeline? Thanks again.
Yeah. You know, T1 is an operational system. As such, the readiness of the system is controlled information. I can't discuss, you know, actual launch date. We are very far along on production, and I think shipping is imminent. I probably can't get any more specific than that.
Got it. Congrats on that win. Thanks, Dirk.
Yeah, thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of David Strauss of Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good evening. Dirk, wanted to ask about in the fiscal 2026 DoD budget that was passed, I think, end of January or late February, there were still a whole bunch of Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 funding in there. Have you actually received all of the Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 funding? Is that reflected in backlog today for you, or is there still a fair amount that of funding that has to come through and be put in your backlog related to Tranche 1 and Tranche 2?
I believe it's all included in the backlog. Kevin, maybe, you know, if you think I'm mistaken, you can speak up.
No. That's right, Dirk. What we report as backlog are only exercised options, and only funded exercised options. It's all our backlog's entirely funded.
Okay. Even though that wasn't you know, the funding wasn't passed until January, you know, after the end of your, you know, 2025 year, that's in the backlog or it isn't in the backlog?
Let me try it this way. All of the programs that we're on, right? Have funds appropriated for them. Then just to get into some of the nuances of how the government funding works is, yes, as we move into different fiscal years, they will then technically fund it, right? The funding does come over time. I think the bigger point is that, you know, all these programs, you know, the money is budgeted and set aside for it. Yes, there is a technical sort of nuance of how the, you know, over time, the actual money moves technically to that program.
Within our backlog, again, it's all exercised contracts or exercised options within those contracts. We don't include unexercised options. A lot of those are the right of launch O&S portions. That's not included in the backlog. To your point, things over time, when the funding actually moves it, we don't move our backlog up and down by the funding amount just because it's a very small portion that's not funded, and we know that the funds are there. It's just more of a technicality of when they occur.
Okay. Can you talk about kind of your current build rate? You know, what are you producing at today? You know, what kind of build rate underlies you know, the 2026 revenue guide as compared to 2025?
I mean, I would say that build rate is not the challenge for us. We're not building up our production in hopes of meeting the demand that we have or meeting future demand. Quite the opposite. York has invested pretty heavily in our production capacity. In our Willow facility alone, we have all the capacity to meet all the production needs through 2028, right? That's Willow alone. It does not include production capacity at our Wazee facility, which is a little bit smaller, but nonetheless, a completely different production facility. Most importantly, our Potomac facility, which is actually four times larger than our Willow facility.
We've actually built out, invested in, and are prepared for massive production numbers on the order of, you know, up to 1,000 satellites a year. That's what we've invested in, and that's what our capacity is today. That's a little bit of a differentiator between a lot of other companies who are still, you know, trying to prove their first product. Even after they prove the first product, you know, try to get to scale. That's a little bit different for us. Everything at just our Willow facility alone meets all our projections through 2028. We have, you know, 4x more capacity in our Potomac facility. We're very well-positioned for the growth that we expect, you know, going on through 2026, 2028, 2029.
Yeah. I'll just maybe add a few things here, Dirk. There's a pretty helpful slide we have in our earnings deck. I think you should all have access to that, either now or after the call. Slide eight, and it shows that right now we have 33 satellites on orbit. We provide you know some general guidance to the satellites that we have currently in our backlog being produced. It's 107, and we expect all 107 of those to be launching over the course of 2026 and 2027. As Dirk mentioned earlier, we can't provide specific launch timing for specific programs. That's controlled information.
What we can say is, broadly speaking, we'll have a total of 140 satellites on orbit by the end of 2027, if not sooner. The way to think about how that ties to our you know, you touched on our revenue. You know, again, over 70% at the midpoint of our guidance is backlog, and that's really just pretty highly predictable revenue stream. It's driven off our cost incurrence. We have a pretty mature, at this point, supply chain. You know, we have daily and weekly discussions, depending on the vendor and the program. It's all to say we have a pretty good line of sight into the tempo of that revenue.
It's all generally tied to the higher theme that over the course of the next two years, we're gonna be putting 107 satellites into orbit. That actually does not include. That 107 number I'm citing does not include, to be clear, that new commercial constellation. We're still working with that customer to fine-tune some of the expectations for launch dates there.
Great. Thank you very much.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Your next question comes from the line of Austin Moeller of Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, Dirk and Kevin. Just my first question here. Given the funding already included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the fiscal year 2026 budget for Golden Dome, what funding do you think might be allocated in this $450 billion reconciliation bill for space that they're talking about? Do you think it might include more satellites or more ground infrastructure for Space Force and DoW?
I mean, at the you know 10,000-ft level, it's gonna include more for both, for sure. Space is absolutely gonna be critical to the you know national defense and what we're doing in the future. That does include a significant amount of ground effort as well. Ground will need to tie, like I said, all the disparate systems together. That's kind of the main challenge that we have, is we have all the capabilities we need. We need to be more efficient in how they talk to one another. Ground will be a huge part of that.
Building out ground is important, and that's you know that's one of the IDIQs that I mentioned was a contract win for us is about York helping to contribute to that. Us helping to contribute on how you know, operate hundreds and thousands of satellites in orbit, how you feed that information and how you distribute that information and disseminate it. Satellites are really the best way of disseminating the information. It's you know, kind of above the entire battlefront.
There's gonna be a significant amount, you know, for both ground and satellites, for both. Now all that said, our pipeline that we've identified and, you know, we have to update it, I'm sure, but we have, you know, $11 billion in identified pipeline right now. You know, that's seemingly only going to grow. I've seen more requests for more funding, for some of our more recent engagements as well. You know, our identified pipeline's $11 billion, and that was before a lot of the growth that you're talking about here.
Okay. As the production launch for Golden Dome or PWSA grows with additional contracts for that constellation or those constellations, what gives you confidence in maintaining the target gross and contribution margins, going forward? Is it just the strong execution record and timely delivery and best-in-class product?
Yeah. I mean, it's you know, for us, it's always the three main metrics is that, you know, best capability, you know, best performance, best schedule, which we meet all on all those fronts. Historically, we have executed a price point that is half the price of our competitors. And we've done it with the margins that we are very close to now. And we think that we have opportunity to increase that because we're only becoming more and more efficient. You know, just as a, you know, kind of a side story, I guess, or an example is critical design review is one of the most critical reviews for any of our programs.
I can say that for the T1 program at CDR, we had 65 engineering heads working that program, and at the same critical design review for T2, we had 15, right? We are seeing significant improvements in our efficiency and our ability to execute. Kevin, I mean, you might have some more comments on those margins there, but those are the margins that we plan to, those are the margins that we price to, those are the margins that we execute on. We've been doing it at those margins at half the price. Kevin, I don't know if there's more you want to add.
Yeah. No, I think you've covered it really well, Dirk. What I would say is that, yes. Given that we are already half the price of our competition, we're starting from a pretty enviable pricing position, right? I don't feel like we need to certainly lower price at all. I think our strategy, as Dirk has outlined in the past, is, you know, probably maintain this pricing. We make nice margins at it. What we can do and what we are doing, right, is as our supply chain matures and we're ordering more volumes, we're gonna see, you know, just our supply base or our cost base start to come down, right? Definitely I think there's more upside to contribution margin.
Just from a sort of an accounting perspective, you know, some of these vertical integration plays that we've done, those are highly accretive to contribution margin. Just the way that the intercompany math works with their profit margin basically getting kind of canceled out. It's all to say, feel very good about contribution margin growing from here. Another aspect of that, frankly, is we've been producing at large scale for a couple of years now, which is something a lot of our competition probably, you know, it still has ahead of them. We've learned just a lot by being in the trenches and fielding these large constellations.
There's no more surprises of, you know, things that we perhaps forgot to price in when we bid a contract a couple of years ago. You know, just that's what you get from the level of experience and repetition that we've had. We don't expect any surprises on the material cost side. Again, the trend will be to continue to drive down our supply chain costs.
Awesome. Thanks for all the details.
Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz of Needham & Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for the question. Let me ask kind of big picture here with regards to the 2026 guide, you know, I see over, you know, over 70% of that's already in backlog. If you could expand on the kind of revenue, the types of revenue or the mix of revenue that's not currently in backlog that you'd expect to see in 2026 for us. Thank you.
You want me to start with that one, Dirk?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. Ryan, yeah, what I'd say is that we are expecting new business award activity to start to pick up as some of these dollars get allocated in the eventual you know sort of spending agencies that will ultimately be awarding the contracts. We think that's gonna take a little bit of time. We think once we kind of get to that mid-year and into the second half, we're gonna start to see some pretty robust award activity, and that's the basis of our range of $545-$595 of rev. We do think most of that will be from our you know traditional you know Department of Defense government sector, whether that's PWSA or Golden Dome or IC.
You know, one of the themes Dirk has touched on today is that, you know, wherever it comes out of, we're a bit agnostic to that because we, you know, just believe the capabilities we have are, you know, positioned well across the board. There'll be a little bit of commercial, that new commercial contract. You know, we're not anticipating substantial revenue recognition from that one this year. I would say it's gonna be largely, you know, second half, you know, government defense a wards, and a little bit of commercial.
Helpful. That's really great. Anything in, on the supply chain, you'd call out as challenging these days? You know, we hear about it in other areas of tech, getting tough. But any particular areas you're concerned about and having to invest, maybe extra working capital to be prepared?
Yeah. I mean, we do hear a lot about supply chains now. I think that we're a little bit differentiated in that sense. How I mean that is, you know, we are at production capacity now, which means that we were tackling supply chain issues several years ago. I think it's a little bit new for folks trying to ramp up now, but we've done that investment. I think, you know, acquisitions like Orbion are very, very helpful in the sense of we can better plan with our partners on kinda what numbers we're gonna need and when, and we can co-invest if that's required. We've done a lot of that already. Our supply chain is, you know, very robust, very secure. We worked these issues many years ago.
We did things like buy solar arrays in bulk ahead of a need, you know, challenges that were coming ahead. We co-invested on some laser capability to stand up production on that. Again, that was for, you know, a T0 contract. We've basically retired a lot of that investment we needed to make in our supply chain. We're kinda more now in improvement cycle, where we're trying to improve it, make it more efficient, and make it a little bit better. You know, us kinda delaying schedule and things like that because of supply chain is a problem that we looked at a couple years ago, and we feel like we have a good handle on it.
I think, you know, when we did the IPO, we did talk about that we were gonna inventory a lot of our spacecraft. We're in a unique position to be able to do that. We have a very large backlog. We have a consistent product. We know that it works. We know that it works in orbit. We are gonna invest in some inventory, which should help with the supply chain challenges as well. The reality is something being delayed is only really a problem if you're already behind, right?
If you are a head of the need and ahead of a schedule and have in-hand inventory product, you know, if something shows up, you know, three weeks later than it should've, but you have inventory spacecraft and you have ahead of a need, then you're able to kinda sustain those impacts. That's where we're focused more is standing up, you know, basically supporting our supply chain to be more efficient, and then we're gonna build inventory spacecraft. That's gonna really take that kinda lead time out of the equation for us.
Great. Maybe one just quick follow-up clarification there. If you're building that inventory and shipping from inventory, is that a different form of rev rec than traditionally?
No, what it does is effectively accelerate the revenue recognition. As Dirk said, w e wanna be smart about building up some satellite platforms in inventory, and then that way our BD folks can be empowered to say, " Hey, how quickly do you need this mission flown?" Because we've proven, I think Dirk touched on in his prepared remarks, with our Dragoon mission, right? We ATP to orbit was 7 months, which is pretty unheard of. What that'll do is we'll kinda build up the cost structure on the balance sheet in inventory, and then once we get that, allocated to a particular revenue-generating program. It'll be a very fast cycle rev rec. It'll be pretty exciting to see that happen.
Yeah. That's cool, Kevin. Alright. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the call.
Yep.
Your next question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu of Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, guys, and congrats on your first quarter. Maybe if I could ask first on just the margin comments and the pricing. You know, you guys offer an affordable solution. What's driving some of the higher margins? I know you talked about the supply chain improvements. What is that? Is that more like supply chain pricing? And how do we think about the volume leverage? And maybe if we could clarify on Orbion, how do we think about the revenue contribution there, given that that's a vertical integration play as well?
Yeah.
Kevin, why don't you talk to that?
I'll touch on that. Yeah. We'll start with the Orbion one. The way it works, broadly speaking, when we acquire a company like Orbion, and like ATLAS, it's the same thing for ATLAS. They do York business and non-York business. When our consolidated numbers are put out, the net impact is just on the non-York business. Because the way it works from an accounting perspective is that their York business, that revenue gets canceled out and the associated COGS from us. Their revenue is our COGS, so to speak. Those net out in the elimination. They are baked into our projections. They're not, I would say, not a substantial portion of our 2026 guidance.
Because again, we're buying companies that we already buy a lot of stuff from, and then so that kind of. It's more of a margin improvement. I touched on earlier. When we do these type of vertical integration acquisitions, they're very accretive to contribution margin, right? Because we're basically stripping out what otherwise would have been profit margin that we were paying to a third-party vendor. Now that just kind of stays within the family, so to speak. So that's a big driver of increased contribution margin and overall gross margin. So that's how that works. You know, just in general, I think you had a question about, you know, margin. You know, our margins improved year-over-year, our gross margin by about 700 basis points.
That's really the result of a couple things. It's program mix. Our newer vintage program. A lot of the growth in revenue in 2025 came from our Tranche 2 transport layer programs, Alpha and Gamma. Those were programs that we priced when we had a lot of reps in our system through T0 and T1. We priced that really well, and those are higher margin. In general, our newer programs are higher margin. It's a factor of mix. We also had reduced negative EAC adjustments in fiscal 2025. Again, that's another sort of proof point of a maturing business and maturing, you know, sort of pricing rigor and cost rigor. We don't expect to see any sort of meaningful negative EAC adjustments as we move forward. It's really those two things that drove the nearly 700 basis point gross margin improvement in 2025.
Got it. Thank you. That's very clear. Maybe if you could just provide a quick update on how you're thinking about Transport Tranche 3 and just the path forward for that mission?
Yeah. As I kinda talked about a little bit earlier, you know, there's no doubt that communications is gonna be a major part of Golden Dome and national defense in general. I believe that it's gonna be restructured under something called the Space Data Network, where, you know, they're working through that architecture and what that'll look like now. My best guess, and it's a guess, is that I think Transport will probably be part of that Space Data Network, and it will interlink with the other systems. It kinda goes to what I was saying before of they're realizing that these systems cannot be disparate and unique, and they need to be part of a larger architecture that works together. My feeling is that I think Transport will definitively be a part of that.
I think that they're working the details of that architecture now and how that'll work. Obviously, I think that we're in a really phenomenal position to win significant parts of that given that we've already, you know, performed so well on T0, T1. We're already under contract for T2. I think our delivered capabilities, flight heritage, and the fact that we're the first time to launch every single time kind of speak to, you know, us being able to deliver that mission successfully. I think it's gonna be part of Space Data Network, and I think that they're working that architecture now, and we feel like we're in a strong position to win that work.
Got it. Okay, thank you.
I will now turn the call back to Dirk Wallinger for closing remarks.
Essentially, I just wanted to say thank you for everyone taking the time who've been. A lot of folks have been following us for a little bit. Appreciate you learning more about what we're doing. Hopefully you can see that we have really strong engagement, the ability to execute. We have a lot of missions in front of us which we're excited to get into. We're seeing our base grow significantly from not only the kind of proliferated LEO national defense systems we've historically worked on. We're seeing new contracts with multiple classified customers. We're seeing large constellations being secured for commercial customers as well. We're really excited about the future. We hope that you'll keep following along with us. Appreciate everyone for taking the time. So, t hank you so much.
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