Allan Evans
Analyst · Needham & Company
Thanks, Brian. 2026 is going to be a year of rapid growth for the U.S. drone ecosystem. We believe we are extremely well positioned as one of the supply chain leaders for components for small drones. As Brian said, we have the capital to execute and the responsibility to demonstrate to our customers and shareholders that we can manage rapid growth. I'm about to go into more detail, but want everyone to note that my following comments are forward-looking and they are in no way guaranteed. Let's start by talking about demand. In general, right now, we view the current drone marketplace as being supply constrained. We see demand outstripping supply this year and deep into 2027. This perception, this idea is the assumption that allows us to procure material, build capacity and otherwise invest in growth more aggressively than we traditionally would. For example, if we order extra material now, we see the constant increase in demand over the next 24 months as consuming any excess that we have and making it reasonably safe from a business perspective to be so aggressive that we could even overbuild in the short term. This supply and demand imbalance and it's dramatic is created by two factors. First, legislative and regulatory actions have removed foreign competition from the market and domestic capacity is nascent. Second, the recent success of drones in international conflicts like Ukraine has resulted in the Department of War driving demand for drones and a domestic supply chain capable of supporting the expected burst drone demand required in a potential war time scenario. The legislation is walled off the garden and the Department of War is providing the influx of capital to quickly mature domestic solutions. There are several legislative actions that all layer in to enable domestic producers to succeed in the U.S. market while making it more difficult for competitors that are overseas to sell into the market. This has been true for the drone companies themselves for a few years with legislation like the American Security Drone Act, but this has recently extended to components providers with legislation in 2025. There were some smaller examples of government action that highlight how quickly this market wall has erected. In early 2025, T-MOTOR, a major Chinese supplier, was added to the entity list and banned from selling in the U.S. And then across 2025, there were tariffs on imported goods that increased the relative cost of our foreign competitors' products relatively to our domestically produced goods. But the most substantial government action was the FCC ban on new licenses for all foreign-made drones and drone parts that went into effect in late December of 2025. The impact of this legislation on our business cannot be overstated. The U.S. drone market for small drones is about $10 billion in revenue annually. That represents about somewhere between a $3 billion and $5 billion total addressable market for parts if the drone market stays flat. And it will all have to be made in the United States going forward or get a waiver from the FCC. This FCC action was unexpected, and it creates a huge marketplace vacuum in both the consumer and enterprise segments to go along with the demand we're seeing from the military segment of the industry. To repeat, we believe the FCC actions have created at least a $3 billion nondefense components marketplace that will require domestic solutions within the next 3 to 5 years and massively expand the total addressable market we can go after. The second government push that is driving demand still on that demand side is the injection from the Department of War. The DOW has recently initiated several programs to buy different types of small drones, including short-range reconnaissance, which is SRR, purpose-built attritable system, PBAS, and most recently and most publicly, the Drone Dominance program. The Drone Dominance program is a very public example of how the Department of War is trying to drive scaling of the drone companies and the supply chain. They have communicated the entire procurement process publicly on their website. They plan on buying 90,000 low-cost drones in 2026 and 250,000 drones in 2027. This program alone represents about $90 million component opportunity for us this year in 2026 and roughly a $250 million component opportunity in 2027. While the environment is set and demand is there, it really doesn't matter unless we, Unusual Machines are able to see and sell into that demand. As of right now, we have about $12 million in outstanding purchase orders that we are working to fulfill. About $9 million of those purchase orders are for programs that are not drone dominant. The first set of 11 winners for Drone Dominance were just announced on Friday. So I expect our sales team is probably reaching out, and we would see additional orders from them hopefully soon. For the record, more than half of the announced winners of Drone Dominance are already customers of ours in some form or fashion. This early demand for our parts from the marketplace gives us a high level of confidence that we can capture a significant percentage of the total demand and total demand growth as long as we deliver quality parts on time for our customers. Given this overwhelming environment of demand, we have started to scale as fast as possible to provide as many products as we can. In very late December, you see some of that on our balance sheet. And in early January, we placed over $15 million worth of raw materials so that we could receive elements from our supply chain to build motors and other products. We have scaled from 81 employees at the end of 2025 to over 140 employees today. We have started a second and third shift at our motor factory, and we're currently producing about 15,000 motors a month, while that number is regularly increasing as we generate efficiencies. We've also started a second shift at our flexible production facility where we kit and do other things to help our customers more effectively manufacture their drones. In addition to scaling our current products, we are working on introducing new products to capture more of the total component market. Some people might call that wallet share. In January, we produced our first U.S.-made Fat Shark headsets, and we are very quickly scaling to be able to manufacture 100 headsets per shift per day, and we expect to hit that run rate sometime in April. We are working on setting up battery pack production, which we expect to be online in the second half of 2026 as well as install a very high-volume automated motor production line in the second half of 2026 that should get us to well over 100,000 motors a month. Finally, we anticipate manufacturing cameras in the United States by the end of 2026. Our explicit goal is to scale production so that we could meet the entire demand for every part that we sell from every company that would get orders in the second phase of Drone Dominance. And we expect that to occur in September of 2026, and we want to be ready. That second tranche requires drone companies to use domestic supply chains or at least NDAA-compliant supply chains and represents a major opportunity for our parts to get designed into their products. This is not mandatory for delivery of drones in this first phase, but it is for the second. We want to be available to all those great companies to be a supplier and deliver on time even if every single one of them requires parts from us. We have enough money to do all of this. We finished 2025 with about $157 million in net working capital and over $100 million in cash. Our growth is not resource constrained, and we are doing a very good job of actively generating revenue as we scale. Our financial position is strong enough that we can consider potential acquisitions if the right opportunity presents itself without having to compromise our growth plans. We do view acquisitions as a meaningful way to go faster, and we would use the template that we used when we acquired Rotor Lab. We see the acquisition plus the build-out in conjunction accelerated our motor production by 6 to 12 months and has allowed us to scale faster. To summarize, 2025 tells the tale of our transformation. The fourth quarter demonstrates tangible outcomes from scaling we started in the third quarter. We are well capitalized, continuing to grow, and we believe that there is overwhelming demand for components that we make for the next 2 years. Unusual Machines is at the forefront of the domestic components market, and the market is undergoing rapid growth. Our business is capitalized and extremely healthy. We are continuing to grow as fast as we possibly can, and I believe we will capture a significant portion of this rapidly expanding market. I am so confident that our team can meet this demand. I want to say thank you again to our entire staff and all of our shareholders and our great customers. And with that, I would like to open up the call to questions.