Baylin Technologies Inc. ($BYL)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Baylin Technologies First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Thursday, May 14, 2026. I'll now turn the call over to Kelly Myles, Director of Marketing and Investor Relations of Baylin Technologies. Please go ahead.

Hello, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining the call this morning to review our first quarter 2026 financial results. On the call today from Baylin are Leighton Carroll, Chief Executive Officer; and Cliff Gary, Chief Financial Officer. We will be available for questions at the end of the presentation. Before we begin, let me make it clear that our comments today may include forward-looking statements and information, and answers to questions that could imply future expectations about the prospects and financial performance of the business for 2026 and beyond and could include the use of non-IFRS measures. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Accordingly, actual performance could differ materially from statements made or information provided today, so you should not place undue reliance on them. We also do not intend to update forward-looking statements or information, except as required by law. I ask that you read our legal disclaimers and explanation of the use of non-IFRS measures and refer you to the risks and assumptions outlined in our public disclosures, in particular, the sections entitled Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors in our annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2025, and our other filings, which are available on SEDAR+. Our Q1 2026 results were released after market close yesterday. The press release, financial statements and MD&A are available on SEDAR+ as well as our website at baylintech.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Leighton.

Thank you, Kelly. Thanks to everyone for joining us. On a strategic front, we continue to engage actively with the prospective lender and shareholders of Kaelus AB to finalize the credit agreement and other agreements in order to obtain the debt financing to complete the acquisition of Kaelus. Subject to the terms of those agreements, the company is targeting completion of the acquisition before the second quarter -- end of the second quarter, excuse me. We believe the transaction will strengthen our platform, broaden our product capabilities, enhance our geography, add new customers and set the company up for further long-term growth. Kaelus is unique in that it has an RF portfolio that is completely complementary to our infrastructure unit. It also has opportunities for certain applicability within our custom antenna unit as well. Operationally, the combination is going to enhance our engineering scale, diversify the manufacturing footprint and include and add RF technologies, including synchronization, filter and anti-jamming solutions. From a commercial perspective, the transaction will create meaningful cross-selling opportunities across both customer bases, strengthen relationships with Tier 1 carriers globally and position the combined company as a more comprehensive end-to-end provider for our -- for Wireless Infrastructure, actually sets us up to be a really good alternative to some of the big boys, which is an important strategic rationale for us. We are excited about the long-term opportunities that the combination would bring and believe the combined organization will be well positioned to drive innovation, continue to expand globally and deliver enhanced value to customers, partners and shareholders. That said, we're here to discuss our results for the first quarter. Let me get to that. Revenue was $16.1 million compared to $18.9 million last year, reflecting softer market conditions with lower sales volumes, primarily in Satcom, and to a lesser extent, Wireless Infrastructure. Gross profit was $6.7 million versus $8 million last year. Gross margin was 41.5% compared to 42.4%. Importantly, we delivered a modest positive adjusted EBITDA of $0.1 million, our ninth consecutive quarter despite the lower revenue environment. We continue to operate with clear market-driven strategies, disciplined approach to cost containment, while prioritizing R&D and product development to support revenue growth and margin improvement. In the first quarter, the gross margin impact from lower revenue was partially offset by a more favorable mix in the Custom Antenna Solutions area and improved gross margin in Satcom. Product mix in infrastructure did affect its gross margins slightly, although they remain -- certainly remain very elevated. I'll now turn the call over to Cliff to walk through the financial results and our liquidity position in more detail.

Thank you, Leighton, and hello, everyone. I'll cover key financial results for the first quarter of 2026 and then comment on liquidity, net debt and recent financing and capital structure developments referenced in our MD&A. Starting with the income statement. Revenue was $16.1 million, down $2.8 million or 14.9% from the $18.9 million in Q1 of 2025, primarily due to lower Satcom sales volume and to a lesser extent, lower Wireless Infrastructure volume. Gross profit was $6.7 million, down $1.3 million from $8 million last year. Gross margin was 41.5% compared to 42.4% in Q1 of 2025. The margin pressure from lower revenue was offset by improved mix in Custom Antenna Solutions and improved Satcom gross margins. Operating expenses decreased year-over-year. Selling and marketing expenses were $1.6 million versus $1.8 million, mainly due to lower commissions and incentive accruals tied to the revenue decline. R&D expense was $2.9 million versus $3.1 million, primarily reflecting lower payroll from reduced Satcom engineering headcount. G&A expenses were $3.6 million versus $4.2 million, mainly due to lower compensation accruals. As a result, the operating loss was $1.5 million compared to $1.1 million last year, driven primarily by the gross profit decline, partially offset by lower operating expenses. Net loss was $2.3 million compared to a net loss of $2 million in Q1 of 2025. EBITDA was negative $0.5 million comparable to last year, and adjusted EBITDA was $0.1 million compared to $0.7 million in Q1 of 2025. Turning to liquidity and the balance sheet items. Net debt was $12.1 million at March 31, 2026, down about $0.3 million from 31 December 2025, largely driven by cash generated from positive working capital movements during the quarter. Our existing revolving credit facility with our principal lender matures at the end of May 2026. As discussed by Leighton, we continue to engage actively with a prospective lender to replace the existing facility concurrent with the closing of the Kaelus AB acquisition. Lastly, our 8.5% convertible unsecured debentures mature on 30th of June 2026. Under the terms, we have the right to repay the principal in common shares at 95% of the current market price. We intend to exercise this common share repayment right and pay the principal amount in common shares rather than cash. The principal outstanding is currently $5.1 million. I'll now turn the call back to Leighton.

Thank you, Cliff. Turning to each of the business lines. Wireless Infrastructure delivered softer results versus prior quarter, but the outlook remains positive. We expect stronger sales of multi-beams, our innovative small cells along with increased stadium deployments beginning in the second quarter and continuing through the remainder of 2026. In fact, I think in March, I did an interview at MWC in Barcelona. And at that time, literally within the past 30 days when I did said interview, we had sold multi-beams to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone U.K., SFR and Orange, both French carriers, continuing our expansion into Europe. We're levering our competitive advantages of our multi-beam portfolio, expanding global opportunities, and we're focused on deepening our penetration in Canada, where we see additional meaningful opportunities with the major carriers. We're also commercializing a new derivative of our multi-beam antenna with several carriers requesting trials. Based on our current assessment, we still anticipate wireless infrastructure's 2026 performance in revenue, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA to be comparable to 2025, which was a very, very strong year for us. Custom Antennas performed at reasonable levels for the quarter, while revenue was largely consistent with the prior year period. We improved gross margins and operational efficiencies, which supported stronger adjusted EBITDA versus last year. Looking ahead, we anticipate further recovery in demand in the second quarter, and we expect full year 2026 revenue to be stronger than 2025. The number of active bids for new projects is -- remains at near record levels. In fact, one of the cool things that has happened really started in Q4 and continues in Q1. We have seen one of our competitors who -- when they were selected for a product, the end customer coming back and saying the performance of their solutions isn't meeting their needs, and we are being asked to do retrofit projects to replace our competitor for several opportunities. This is kind of a nice development, and it speaks to how we have focused on engineering and capability as opposed to just cost in that market segment and why that strategy works over the long term. Satcom definitely had a challenging first quarter, driven by reduced demand for specialized custom engineered products such as high-power amplifiers. While Satcom's backlog did increase over the quarter, it remains at a relatively low level from what we would want for that business. And conversion opportunities into orders is not where we want it to be either. A lot of that is driven by the market conditions and the market changes, meaning there is a lot going on geopolitically. There's a lot going on with military opportunities and defense opportunities are fantastic, but governments tend to make purchasing decisions slowly and release purchase orders slowly. So while we have a very significant pipeline of opportunities in front of us, the conversion speed is slow, and we are seeing the results of that. We expect Satcom's 2026 financial performance to be weaker than 2025, and we have taken actions to align the cost structure to the current volume environment. In May, we placed 19 employees on temporary layoff for the remaining workforce -- with parts of the remaining workforce participating in a federal work share program that reduces regular working hours. At a company level, our backlog was $22.9 million at the end of the quarter, up from $20.4 million at December 31, 2025. It reflects stronger order intake in Wireless Infrastructure and Satcom. Backlog was $21.9 million at April 30, 2026, and we continue to see certainly, macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, tariffs remain in place and customer purchasing behavior is continuing to evolve. And certainly, the war in the Middle East is -- and the price of transportation and raw materials continues to be a focus for us to manage. Overall, I still love the future of our business. I'm excited about the Kaelus opportunity. We are close. I would like to -- I would have liked for it to have been closed by now, but we are close, and we remain confident in the long-term future of this business. That concludes our formal remarks. Operator, we would be pleased to take questions.

[Operator Instructions]

My guess is that this -- we will not have questions because there are...

We have a questions.

Oh, we do. Okay. I'm sorry.

We have a question from Daniel Rosenberg from Paradigm.

Leighton and Cliff, my first question was just around the Satcom business. I know you're speaking to longer lead times there. I was wondering how you think about the product portfolio and serving that market in the longer term? Do you see yourself investing in new product portfolio? Is what you have the right fit? Can you just speak to that, please?

Yes. No, I think the thing that is interesting and the pipeline is really going to speak to this. The legacy products that we had, while they certainly made incredible performance levels, they were traditionally more difficult to manufacture and had higher parts complexity, i.e., supply chain complexity, procurement complexity associated with it. The new products, whether it's the Genesis or the Summit III is the common component architecture strategy, simplifying supply chain, reducing costs and improving margins. That was always part of our playbook. The thing is it has to work and it has to deliver real value to customers. Last year, we really saw that product start to gain traction with customers in many respects, solely based on functionality, functionality differences with legacy product and functionality differences with competitive products. What we're seeing this year is repeat orders, customers coming back and increasing what they are asking for and what is in our pipeline, meaning the product evolution that we have been on is leading to further sales volume and growth over time. So we actually feel pretty good about our product strategy. We're not throwing every dime in the kitchen sink into product development in Satcom given the environment we're in, but the innovation that we have been performing over the past several years is starting to bear fruit and does set up well. The challenge has been when you have become as defense heavy as a percentage of pipeline as we are, the conversion rate for those -- the conversion speed probably is a better way to say it, conversion speed isn't immediate, but that defense side of it, a lot of those programs, it's not, oh, here's a purchase order. It's here's a purchase order for Phase 1, which is generally the smallest of multiple phases. And we certainly have several examples of that, not just in the pipeline, but in purchase orders that we have won that are defense related.

And then just turning to infrastructure. It sounds like you're continuing to see some solid business there. I was just curious how much visibility you have and kind of what are your thoughts on spending cycle for the telecom providers as you think about more than 1 year out?

Yes. It's interesting. If I go back to where Baylin was when I joined, it was U.S. carrier and specific U.S. carrier heavy in terms of revenue mix. And what we have seen is, there has been a broader diversification of where the spend is. Everyone saw some of the press releases about Rogers and what has been going on there. By diversifying our revenue across multiple carriers, multiple 3POs, American Tower, Crown Castle, Boingo, Boldyn, system integrators, other people in the wireless market working on private 5G solutions. For us, the opportunity in the overall spend levels, we see elevated. It's just -- it's not where it was, say, 10, 15 years ago where it was just carriers. So part of what we've done is in our product strategy and our customer strategy is diversify, diversify, diversify. We ended up with a slower January and February. And by the way, there were still some carrier reasons for that. A lot of carriers started -- T-Mobile actually had their distribution center shut down through February, which I don't think any of us in this industry has seen before and caused slowness that was unanticipated. The flip side is the products are selling, the products are selling across product diversity sales and certainly customer diversity sales and the backlog continues to go quickly. And one of the easy examples is there's a multiphase upgrade going into Manhattan for small cells from a 3PL. It's all our gear, and we only have the first purchase order. There is more coming, that's going to roll through the year. That's not from a wireless carrier. So for us, we like how we've positioned ourselves. We like the fact that we're expanding into Europe, and we see continued opportunity for growth within that business despite the slowness in Q1.

And then just -- I guess your Cliff, you mentioned $5.1 million paid in common shares that I missed what that was related to. Just could you clarify that for me, please?

Yes, the convertible -- go ahead, Cliff.

I was just going to say the same thing. It's related to the convertible debentures that are on our balance sheet.

And last one for me. So you did speak to cost of transportation and tariffs. Maybe any granularity there in terms of can things -- how easy or hard is it to -- levers you have to control these costs, how you're just thinking about them, please?

Yes. Tariffs, we've actually been -- April of last year was bananas. We're confident in our tariff mitigation strategies and what we work through, particularly with our auditors, RSM and the package that we have to mitigate. Obviously, we are looking at what the U.S. government does related to CUSMA and any implications that would have for our satellite business, also understanding that we have a sister facility for that business in the U.S. On the raw material prices perspective, we are seeing particularly metals at elevated levels. And we work to grind on those prices. We also are -- and I'm very thankful for my operational team. They are constantly doing work to drive cost out. So if you have a raw material that you can't change the price of that has gotten to an elevated level, you have to balance that by taking cost out or improve efficiencies in your operations. And we've done -- I honestly feel like we've done a very good job of that. So it's a bit of a balance. And it's -- at the end of the day, it's our job to manage our cost structure and still drive to profitability.

There are no further questions. Presenters, please continue.

I'll just wrap it up by saying thank you to everyone who joined. It was not the quarter that I necessarily wanted. I do like elevated backlog and continuing to build, particularly with what we're doing in infrastructure. Satcom has still remains -- has a very nice pipeline in front of it, a little frustrated on the conversion speed. And then finally, we remain very excited about the combination with Kaelus, getting that transaction done, working on cross-selling and synergies and growing our business even further. I appreciate everyone's time. Thank you for joining.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.