Lantronix : Q2 Earnings Transcript (Lantronix Q2FY26 Earnings Transcript)

About this update from Lantronix, Inc.

Lantronix, Inc. 2026 Q2 Results Conference Call Wednesday, February 04, 2026, 04:30 PM ET CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Saleel Awsare-- President and Chief Executive Officer Brent Stringham-- Chief Financial Officer PRESENTATION Operator Good day, and welcome to the Lantronix, Inc. 2026 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brent Stringham, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead. Brent Stringham Good afternoon and thank you for joining our fiscal second quarter earnings call. Joining me today is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Saleel Awsare. A live and archived webcast of today's call will be available on the company's website. In addition, you can find the call-in details for the phone replay in today's earnings release. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from current expectations. We encourage you to review the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in today's earnings release, which was furnished to the SEC and is available on our website and other SEC filings such as our 10-K and 10-Qs. Lantronix undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. Additionally, during the call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Today's earnings release, which is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website, describes the differences between our non-GAAP and GAAP reporting and presents reconciliations for the non-GAAP financial measures that we use. With that, I will now turn the call over to Saleel. Saleel Awsare Thanks, Brent, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. We continued our momentum into the second quarter through disciplined execution, delivering revenue of 29.8 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.04, both well within our guidance range. As expected, we experienced double-digit growth year-over-year when excluding our EMEA smart grid customer, Gridspertise. Profitability remained strong, driven by continued year-over-year gross margin expansion and the operating leverage created by last year's cost optimization initiatives. Overall, Q2 was another step forward in aligning financial execution with our long-term Edge AI strategy. More importantly, we are now seeing that strategy translates into tangible customer adoption across multiple end markets as several customer engagements are moving from development and pilots into broader deployment. As we discuss our end markets, it's worth noting that the government shutdown last quarter created a short-term slowdown in purchasing activity from certain federal agency customers. Despite this disruption, our teams executed well and delivered solid results. Diving into the markets we operate in, beginning with drones and unmanned systems, calendar 2026 is widely expected to mark the start of an unmanned aerial systems super cycle, reflecting accelerating adoption of autonomous platforms across defense and commercial applications. This view is increasingly supported by the broader defense funding environment. The signed fiscal 2026 U.S. defense budget already includes over 13 billion in enacted funding allocated across unmanned systems, autonomy, ISR and counter-UAS programs, including reconnaissance drone initiatives across the full range of mission profiles. While portions of this funding have yet to be released, the scale and breadth of these allocations suggests meaningful capacity to support more advanced unmanned platforms as programs move from development into execution. Looking ahead, we believe unmanned autonomous and AI-enabled platforms are well positioned to capture a growing share of future defense modernization spending. We are also seeing a broader shift in how the Department of War engages with domestic drone supply chain with a more commercial and partnership-oriented mindset focused on accelerating readiness and scaling production across trusted suppliers. Against this backdrop, our evolution within unmanned systems positions Lantronix squarely in the value creation layer of the ecosystem. Since entering this market, we moved up the stack from initially providing general purpose compute modules to delivering intelligent imaging platforms and now to enabling integrated system-level workflows that combine sensing, processing and secure connectivity. In many deployments, our AI edge compute modules serve as the brains of the drone, enabling autonomous operation and real-time decision-making independent of a network connection. As a result, Lantronix operates at the intersection of payload, compute and connectivity, 3 of the highest value and least easily substituted layers in modern unmanned systems where we believe value creation and customer relationships compound over time. We currently focus on Group 1 and 2 short-range reconnaissance drones, which aligns well with where a significant portion of current unmanned funding is directed. These programs typically represent multiyear engagement with strong lifetime value supporting applications ranging from surveillance to advanced payloads. Today, we are working with over 15 OEMs, and these customers are increasingly looking to deepen their engagement with us. In response to customer demand, we introduced our drone reference kit at CES last month, designed to accelerate time to market for defense and commercial UAV developers. This platform reinforces our strategic shift from a component supplier to a platform partner by reducing integration complexity and development risk in regulated environments. Red Cat with their Teal Drones continues to expand their work with us beyond hardware into software and next-generation platform development. As their production needs increase, we are expanding our support, accordingly, including higher volume bills for the Teal platform and follow-on commitments that reinforce Red Cat's confidence in our capabilities. We are also partnering in their next-generation drone platform, strengthening our position as a long-term partner. Additionally, we were selected by Flightwave, a Red Cat company to incorporate our Open-Q System-on-Module into their new drone, another example of the deepening trust in our technology across the ecosystem. Importantly, these engagements are not limited to design wins or early development. We have demonstrated the operational capability to support high-volume production today, and we believe we are well positioned to scale alongside our customers as the United States and allied governments accelerate deployment of unmanned system. In December, our Edge AI solution was selected by Trillium Engineering to power gimbaled imaging systems deployed across ISR, infrastructure inspection and wildfire operations, validating the performance, security and reliability of our Edge AI architecture for mission-critical deployments. We also recently secured our first design win with Flock Safety in the drone as first responder or DFR category, extending our Edge AI capabilities into public safety applications. While early, this win represents growing interest beyond defense in real-time AI-enabled situational awareness at the edge. Lastly, we expanded our engagement into AI-enabled threat detection through a new collaboration with Safe Pro Group. Together, we are helping building an integrated edge intelligence ecosystem by combining Safe Pro's object threat detection models with our compute modules to enable real-time on-device detection of land mines and other ground hazards without the reliance on cloud connectivity. By allowing drones and autonomous platforms to identify threats that endanger soldiers, vehicles and civilians on the ground, this collaboration meaningfully strengthens our role at the center of a growing network of defense and autonomous systems standardizing on AI compute technology. We are seeing clear and accelerating momentum in our drone business through the first half of fiscal 2026. Drone revenues grew meaningfully from Q1 to Q2, driven by deeper customer engagement and the early benefits of our platform-led approach, positioning us to realize operating leverage as programs scale over time. As customer programs expand and move further into execution, we are seeing continued growth through the remainder of the fiscal year and into fiscal 2027. Reflecting the strength and the pace of our momentum since entering the drone market approximately a year ago, we are raising our expectation to a range of $8 million to $12 million in drone revenue this fiscal year, an increase from the previous range of $5 million to $10 million with drones becoming an increasingly meaningful contributor as programs scale. Now turning to critical infrastructure monitoring, an important long-term pillar of our industrial IoT strategy, where our intelligent hardware, secure connectivity and perception software come together to deliver end-to-end solutions. Moving to our Tier 1 U.S. mobile network operator. The rollout continues to progress as expected. We recognized revenue over the last 2 quarters, and this deployment remains an important foundation of our recurring revenue strategy. Looking ahead, our focus is on expanding beyond monitoring generators into additional high-value applications within the tower, including backup power bands and rectifiers. Each cell tower includes these systems, and the opportunity is compatible in size to the generated deployment we support today. This program represents a step forward in building recurring revenue and is scaling into a repeatable multiyear deployment model. Over the last 12 months, software and services accounted for approximately 6% of total revenue, which we view as the early innings. As we replicate this model across additional sites and applications, we see a clear and achievable path to more than doubling that mix over the mid-term by layering software, analytics and AI pipeline orchestration into hardware deployments already in the field. At CES, we debuted SmartEdge.ai and SmartSwitch.ai, our new Edge AI gateway and AI-powered fiber switch. Together, these solutions create a unified platform for real-time video analytics, intelligent connectivity and multi-camera orchestration across enterprise and industrial environments. A key advantage of this platform is its ability to upgrade existing infrastructure. There are millions of deployed non-intelligent cameras and devices already in the field, and our solutions enable customers to bring AI capabilities to these environments without requiring hardware replacement. This significantly expands our addressable market and supports scalable brownfield upgrade opportunities across surveillance, smart buildings and critical infrastructure. In summary, I'm encouraged by our performance through the first half of fiscal 2026. We are executing with discipline as we scale high-growth verticals, expand software-enabled recurring revenue and deliver continued operating leverage from a leaner cost structure. What's most compelling is that our diversified growth vectors, unmanned systems, critical infrastructure monitoring and enterprise connectivity are increasingly converging around a common edge AI platform. This convergence enables efficient scaling, deeper customer relationships and positions Lantronix to capture long-term secular tailwinds across aerospace, defense and intelligent infrastructure. With that, I'll turn the call back to Brent to cover the financial results. Brent? Brent Stringham Thank you, Saleel. Let me begin by going through the financial results for our fiscal second quarter, including some of the key drivers behind our performance. I'll then provide our outlook for the third quarter ending March 31, 2026. As Saleel noted, in the current quarter, we delivered revenue of 29.8 million. Excluding Gridspertise, we experienced year-over-year growth driven by strength in embedded compute, including our A&D and drone programs, along with solid contributions from our network infrastructure switch products. We also delivered higher SaaS-based ARR supported by the ongoing ramp of our critical infrastructure monitoring deployment with the Tier 1 MNO we've discussed. Turning to gross margins. In the second quarter, GAAP gross margin was 43.6% compared to over a 3-year high of 44.8% last quarter and was up from 42.6% a year ago. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 44% compared to 45.3% last quarter and 43.2% in the prior year quarter. As we mentioned previously, the prior quarter's margin partially benefited from certain inventory recoveries and royalty benefits that came in slightly above plan. Overall, our continued underlying margin performance is supported by a higher mix of premium products and the disciplined cost management that we've been speaking to. Turning to expenses and profitability. GAAP operating expenses in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 were 14 million, down just under 6% from the prior quarter and also down approximately 9% from 15.4 million in the year ago period as our P&L continues to benefit from the actions we took last year. GAAP net loss for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 improved to 1.3 million or $0.03 per share compared to GAAP net loss of 2.4 million or $0.06 per share in the year ago quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, net income improved to 1.6 million or $0.04 per share compared to non-GAAP net income of 1.5 million or $0.04 per share in the prior quarter. Turning to the balance sheet. Net inventories were 27.1 million as of December 31, 2025, compared to 26.8 million in the prior quarter and 29.1 million in the year ago quarter. Wednesday, February 04, 2026, 04:30 PM ET

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