Earnings call transcript: Byrna Technologies Q4 2024 revenue beats forecast

Byrna Technologies Inc. reported robust financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024, surpassing revenue expectations with a 79% year-over-year increase to $28 million. The company's performance, marked by a significant turnaround to profitability, sparked a 6.51% rise in its stock price, reflecting investor confidence in its strategic initiatives and market positioning. According to InvestingPro , which provides in-depth coverage of Byrna Technologies among 1,400+ top US stocks. The company plans to increase its presence in Sportsman's Warehouse (NASDAQ:SPWH) stores, aiming for 50 locations by the end of 2025 and 100 by 2026.

Executive Commentary

"We believe that the market for less lethal weapons among gun owners in The U.S. is in the tens of millions of consumers," stated CEO Brian Ganz, highlighting the company's growth potential. He also emphasized the importance of their strategic retail partnerships, saying, "Our confidence in this initiative is supported by our Las Vegas store data."

Risks and Challenges

• Byrna faces potential risks from evolving trade policies, which could impact supply chain stability.
• Wage increases to attract manufacturing talent may affect cost structures.
• The company's reliance on new retail strategies could present challenges if consumer demand shifts.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the expected performance of new retail locations and the impact of administrative changes on demand. Byrna's management expressed confidence in their retail strategy, projecting significant revenue contributions from each Sportsman's Warehouse store and minimal impact from political changes.

Full transcript - Byrna Technologies Inc (BYRN) Q4 2024:

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Good morning. Welcome to Verna's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. My name is Kevin, and I'll be your operator for today's call. Joining us for today's presentation are the company's CEO, Brian Ganz and CFO, Laurie Kearns. Following their remarks, we'll open the call to questions.

Earlier today, Werner released results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full year ended 11/30/2024. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before turning the call over to Brian Gans, Verna Technologies' Chief Executive Officer, I will read the safe harbor statement. Some discussions held today include forward looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from the statements made today.

Please refer to Berndre's most recent 10 K and 10 Q filings for a more complete description of risk factors that could affect these projections and assumptions. The company assumes no obligations to update forward looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. As this call will include references to non GAAP results, please see the press release in the Investor Relations section of our website, ir.burnett.com, for further information regarding forward looking statements and reconciliations of non GAAP results to GAAP results. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Vernon's CEO, Brian Ganz. Sir, please proceed.

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Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We will be filing our 10 K with the SEC today. We're not sure if it's going to get out before the open or after the close, but it is in for filing. And as Kevin mentioned, we've issued a press release providing our financial results and business highlights for the fiscal fourth quarter and for the full year ended 11/30/2024. I'm going to start by turning the call over to our CFO, Laurie Kearns, who will review our financial results for the period.

Following her remarks, I'll discuss the operational highlights that drove our record $28,000,000 in revenue and continued GAAP and non GAAP EBITDA profitability for the fourth quarter. I'll then offer insights into our strategy moving forward before we open the call to questions from our covering research analysts. Laurie?

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. Let's review our financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter and the full year ended 11/30/2024. Net revenue for the fourth quarter was $28,000,000 a 79% increase from the $15,600,000 reported in the fiscal fourth quarter of twenty twenty three. This $12,400,000 increase is primarily due to the transformational shift in our advertising strategy, which we began in September 2023, and the resulting normalization of burnout and the less lethal space generally. In Q4, direct to consumer revenues increased by $8,900,000 through burnout.com and amazon.com compared to the prior year period.

For the full year 2024, net revenue totaled $85,800,000 up 101% from $42,600,000 in 2023. Gross profit for Q4 twenty twenty four was $17,600,000 or 62.8 percent of net revenue compared to $9,000,000 or 57.8% of net revenue for Q4 twenty twenty three. For the full year 2024, gross profit was $52,800,000 or 61.5% of net revenue compared to $23,600,000 or 55.5% of net revenue for the same period in 2023. The improvement in gross profit margin is largely attributable to additional sales through our higher margin DTC channels and intensive cost component reduction effort spearheaded by Berna's engineering team and the economies of scale resulting from increased production volumes. Operating expenses for Q4 twenty twenty four were $13,500,000 compared to $9,700,000 for Q4 twenty twenty three.

For the full year 2024, operating expenses were $46,100,000 compared to $31,400,000 for the same period in 2023, reflecting a 47% increase year over year. The increase in operating expenses was driven by an increase in our variable selling costs, such as freight and third party processing fees, credit card fees, increased marketing spend and higher payroll expenses in marketing and engineering as the company has scaled to handle increased sales and production volumes. Net income for Q4 twenty twenty four was $9,700,000 compared to a net loss of $800,000 for Q4 twenty twenty three, a $10,500,000 improvement. This increase was driven by higher revenue and a $5,600,000 income tax benefit. The tax benefit arose from the release of tax valuation allowances related to net operating loss carryforwards and other tax assets.

For the full year 2024, net income was $12,800,000 a $21,000,000 improvement from a net loss of $8,200,000 in the prior year. The increase in net income was driven by higher revenue and included a $5,700,000 income tax benefit due to the full release of U. S. Tax valuation allowances. Adjusted EBITDA, a non GAAP metric for Q4 twenty twenty four, totaled $5,200,000 compared to $400,000 for Q4 twenty twenty three.

This brings adjusted EBITDA for the full year to $11,500,000 compared to a negative $2,000,000 in the prior year. Cash and cash equivalents at 11/30/2024 totaled $16,800,000 compared to $20,500,000 at 11/30/2023. The change in cash and cash equivalents is primarily due to an $8,900,000 investment into marketable securities. Cash and short term marketable securities totaled $25,700,000 which is an increase of $5,200,000 compared to 11/30/2023. Inventory at 11/30/2024 totaled $20,000,000 compared to $13,900,000 at 11/30/2023.

The company has no current or long term debt. I'll now turn it back to Brian.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Thank you, Laurie. And just to remark on her last comment there, although the cash levels were down, cash and marketable securities were up significantly from the year before as we took some of our excess cash and put it into short term paper. Okay. As our results demonstrate, 2024 was a standout year for Berna. For the last five quarters, we have grown revenue quarter over quarter, culminating in a $28,000,000 quarter in Q4 of last year, totaling $85,800,000 for the year, more than double our 2023 revenue.

This growth reflects our team's ability to market our products effectively and to scale our production to meet demand. A key milestone, which we announced earlier this year, was hitting the 500,000 launch or sold mark, which we eclipsed in November. This reinforces our progress in normalizing less lethal alternatives and establishing them as a widely accepted category in personal self defense. With 500,000 launchers sold, this is no longer just a flash in the pan. This is a real market.

Since selling our first launcher in 2019, we've experienced remarkable growth and we are just getting started. Okay. Our marketing strategy continues to be anchored by our celebrity endorsement program. Since launching this initiative in September 2023, we've seen a remarkable increase in both orders and brand awareness. By carefully managing these partnerships, this year, we achieved more than a five times ROAS or return on advertising spend across all advertising platforms.

This highly accretive threshold has helped us achieve this record profitability and become a stable cash flowing enterprise. We continue to refine our approach, testing new influencers and new platforms in different markets, starting with an initial trial period before making a long term commitment. Unfortunately, we recently terminated a few relationships with several celebrity endorsers that were unable to achieve our minimum ROAS requirements. However, to date, we have not had to terminate any of our celebrity endorsers that were initially successful. Rather, the celebrity endorsers that we've had to terminate were never able to achieve our minimum ROAS requirements during the initial trial period.

Unfortunately, we did lose one very successful celebrity endorser, Governor Mike Huckabee, due to his appointment as Ambassador to Israel. We are excited to be onboarding new prominent voices in media and politics, including Megyn Kelly, Charlie Kirk and Lara Trump as new partners in Q1 of this year. With their strong engaged audiences and influential platforms, we expect them to drive meaningful brand awareness and deliver strong results for the upcoming period. We are also expanding the platforms where we are running our advertisements as more and more cable and Internet in web sales, our highest margin sales channel, were directly attributable to our current roster of influencers. These influencers spread the word about our mission to provide less lethal personal security solutions, and they have helped us successfully build a very strong brand awareness.

This has also allowed us to build a more robust multi channel marketing strategy that now includes traditional media such as cable and broadcast networks. Prior to our advertising pivot, we were not allowed to broadcast on traditional broadcast TV channels. Fast forward to now, and we are able to advertise regularly on new networks, and we are also frequently featured in news stories as less lethal solutions become a larger part of the conversation. Yesterday, I just returned from Nashville where we had a retail store grand opening and three of the four local affiliates covered the opening. Two of them came to the event.

They took video of the shooting in the range and that story played more than 20 times in the local market. This change from a year ago demonstrates that more and more people are becoming familiar with our products and they are beginning to see us as the solution to the epidemic of gun violence. We also believe that the changes that have occurred in both public sentiment and the position of some of the social media platforms since the new administration was elected bode well for burnout. We have traditionally been banned from advertising on social media and on most of the mainstream media platforms. But with both social media and mainstream media relaxing their restrictions in the wake of the election, we are hopeful that a number of these channels will open up to us.

We are already seeing some movement with a number of the cable TV networks and we have started to take advantage of these channels. We believe that Bernd has proven track record in saving lives coupled with the normalization of the product category and the shift in public sentiment will allow us to continue to expand our advertising efforts and in turn the size of the audience that we are able to reach. Additionally, we are building out our physical store presence to reach our customers in new ways. We have strong data from Las Vegas, our first store, which in 2024 did in excess of $1,000,000 in sales at a gross margin of more than 65%. To support our thesis that when potential customers have the chance to fire the launcher and experience the less lethal difference, we have decided to open additional four stores.

As I mentioned, we just opened our Nashville store and I was there for the grand opening. We will be opening stores in the Scottsdale, Arizona and Salem, New Hampshire locations in the next few weeks. In fact, Scottsdale will have its grand opening on February 19 and Salem, New Hampshire will have its grand opening on March 5. Our Fort Wayne, Indiana store is expected to come online in the March timeframe. While we had initially planned to open a store in Pasadena, California, we had to pause those plans while we evaluate the impacts of the recent wildfires.

And in response to these wildfires, Bernard donated 10 of the sales from a designated week in January to support those affected. As our Chief Marketing Officer, Luan Pham, a Los Angeles native said, Berta's mission has always been about protecting people and that includes supporting them when they are in need of help. As previously mentioned, each of the stores we are opening will have a fire range, four to five burn employees, a simple slat wall design showcasing our less lethal products. With these brick and mortar investments, we do expect our

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: capital expenditures to be elevated in

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: the first quarter, but we expect them to them to provide immense value in the long term. Similarly to the store in Las Vegas, we expect contribution margins to be in the 20% to 25% range from each store once they are fully ramped up, which we expect to take four to six months after opening. If any of our investors are near a store location, I would urge you to go to the store and experience this firsthand. On our last call, I mentioned that we upgraded that we were upgraded by our national accounts at Bass Pro and Cabela's to all of their locations. Today, I am pleased to share that we recently signed a letter of intent to form a new partnership with Sportsman's Warehouse.

Starting in the second quarter, we expect to be launching a Burnout store within a store model at 11 Sportsman's Warehouse locations across The United States. If this initial pilot program succeeds, as we expect it will, we plan to expand into 50 additional locations by the end of twenty twenty five and one hundred locations total by the end of twenty twenty six. This concept, modeled after the success of Ralph Lauren (NYSE:RL)'s Store Within a Store program, is designed to roll out our brick and mortar experience more quickly than we would be able to do with our own retail presence. As part of this agreement, each Sportsman's Warehouse will convert its existing archery range into a burn of firing range where customers can experience our launchers. We believe that this is a critical component to the program success as the conversion rate in our brick and mortar stores is around 80%, while our conversion rate online is a little over 1%.

Berna has agreed to fund 50% of the build out of the Store Within a Store locations in each of Sportsman's stores where they carry the store within a store model. Our confidence in this initiative is supported by our Las Vegas store data and also by a case study by a traditional gun store last year where we opened up a store within a store. Zacks Sporting Goods in Round Lake, New York approached us in May of twenty twenty four wanting to be a premier a Burnham Premier dealer. Because Backs was primarily a gun store, they did not meet our premier dealer requirement. We then settled on trying a store within a store model and it quickly became a success.

In just seven months, the store had sales of $400,000 of burner product. Now, Zacks is projecting more than $1,000,000 of sales of burner products in 2025. This is the type of success we hope to replicate at Sportsman's Warehouse with our initial 11 stores. We have also committed to providing training for the employees and support them with demo rounds and CO2, so that they can really get a lot of the traffic that goes into the Sportsman's Warehouse stores into the Burna range. We are also leveraging strategic partnerships beyond retail.

Recently at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas, we announced our partnership with the USCCA, the United States Concealed Carry Association to promote our less lethal solutions. The USCCA has nearly 1,000,000 members and they will now have access to burn up. We believe that many of their members will be interested on our less lethal products because these are the most responsible gun owners, gun owners that want to take training, gun owners that want to have insurance in case something goes wrong. These are the people that are interested in the non lethal burn a solution. Likewise, our customers will now have the opportunity to learn from the USCCA from trading and education to self defense liability insurance.

Altogether, our momentum in retail expansion, influencer marketing, strategic partnerships positions us to attract new customers and convert them into long term supporters of burn up and the less lethal movement. To support our growth initiatives, we successfully increased monthly launcher production this year to 24,000 units, a 33% increase from our previous capacity of 18,000 units. To do this, we implemented a second shift at our Fort Wayne, Indiana facility, where we have been able to attract and retain top talent by increasing wages 10% in the second half of last year, which made us one of the higher paying manufacturers in the Fort Wayne region. In addition to expanding launcher production, we also opened our domestic ammunition facility just four miles down the road from our launcher facility in Fort Wayne. The on shoring of our ammo production is part of Verna's overall Made in America strategy.

This brings me to the recent discussions around the tariffs on goods coming in from China, Canada and Mexico, which have raised questions about the potential impact on Bona. To clarify this, these tariffs do not affect our current production costs in any meaningful way. Burna sources no components or launcher for its launches or ammunition from Mexico or from Canada with the only exception being the five count ammo tubes, which are produced in Canada and cost only $0.09 The three tubes per kit total $0.27 So a hypothetical 25% tariff would only add $0.07 to $0.08 a kit. Alberta, as I said, doesn't manufacture any products in Mexico currently. With regards to China, Berna's exposure is very limited.

While we currently source certain magazine components from China, we have implemented a dual sourcing strategy, securing production for the magazines in both India and South Africa as well. This ensures that burn is not dependent on China for any critical components mitigating the risk of increased tariffs. Accordingly, we would actually welcome higher tariffs on Chinese goods as many of our competitors produce their products in China. As a result, the announced duties on China, Canada our production cost. From a sales standpoint, while potential retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico could impact our projected growth in these markets, we don't anticipate significant disruptions at

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: this time. In 2024,

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: burn in sales in Mexico

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: grew to 0.1

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: In 2024, burnished sales in Mexico grew to $890,000 from $300,000 the prior year. We expect this figure to at least double in 2025. In Canada, sales grew from $1,360,000 in 2023 to $2,470,000 in 2024, and we expect these sales to grow to approximately $4,000,000 in 2025. That said, we are currently working with a partner to bring in and distribute our DTC launchers from inside Canada, which would significantly reduce the impact of any new tariffs or duties. We are keeping a close eye on evolving trade policies, but our diversified supply chain and strategic sourcing approach position us well to navigate through any potential shifts with minimal or no disruption.

On a related note, even though China is not the sole supplier for anything we use in our launchers or ammo, we remain committed to exiting China by mid year and being in the position to source virtually 100% of the components needed for production of the SBRETA SD, LE and CL models from U. S. Suppliers by the end of twenty twenty five. This transition will fully insulate us from any potential tariffs as well as create well paying jobs for American workers, reduce lead times, eliminate risks associated with unreliable foreign suppliers and supply chains. And finally, it will allow us to advertise the Berna as a made in America product.

This new state of the art ammo facility will house a total of eight manufacturing machines that are capable of producing both 68 caliber rounds and 61 caliber rounds, which we'll need for our new compact launcher, as well as 61 caliber fin tail payload rounds used in our payload 12 gauge less lethal ammunition. We believe that the introduction of the Burna Pepper and Max 12 gauge rounds coupled with Sportsman's store, their store partnership will help spur the sale of our less lethal 12 gauge rounds. In total, these eight machines will be able to produce 10,000,000 payload rounds, including 1,500,000 Fintail rounds for the 12 gauge once they're fully operational later this year. We will this will help us keep up with the demand we see both here and internationally. Speaking of which, we have seen significant success in Argentina.

On the ammunition side, the Cordoba Province Police committed to purchasing 1,700,000 rounds of payload ammunition last month. This order, which will be shipped in 200,000 round increments to the balance of $20.25, underscores the fact that the 13,500 Verna launchers sold to the Cordoba Police Department have been deployed and are being used extensively to apprehend dangerous criminals and maintain the peace in Argentina. As a reminder, in 2024, we sold our stake in the joint venture, Bernal LatAm, which allows us to book the sales we make to Bernal LatAm and to collect royalties on every launcher that they produce. We believe that there is still significant untapped potential in these markets and our partners at Bernal Latam will help us reach new customers and expand with our current customers. As previously reported, we have left the door open to reacquire the whole of Bernal Latam should they reach critical scale and implement the accounting and internal controls appropriate for U.

S. Company. Looking ahead, we expect future growth to continue in both The U. S. And the international markets.

Our Compact Launcher remains on schedule, and we believe that this new launch will provide us with a significant sales boost and higher margins later in this year, as well as unlocking an audience that is looking for a smaller launcher that is better concealed for better suited for concealed carry. In conclusion, we are optimistic about the trajectory of the business, the ongoing success of our marketing efforts that's resulted in less lethal becoming a much more widely accepted personal self defense category. In fact, we believe that the market for less lethal weapons among gun owners in The U. S. Is in the tens of millions of consumers.

This growing market, coupled with the growth of our online presence, the expansion of our retail presence and our growing international opportunities, all reinforce our confidence in the long term demand for less lethal weapons generally and for Verna products in particular. While the first quarter historically experiences a seasonal slowdown in consumer spending, we do expect to achieve very strong year over year growth as we continue executing on our strategic initiatives. We believe that Verna is well positioned to generate additional cash and expand our profitability in 2025 and beyond. That includes my prepared remarks. Kevin?

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. The company will now be taking questions from sell side analysts. Our first question is coming from Matt Koranda from Roth Capital Partners (WA:CPAP). Your line is now live.

Matt Koranda, Analyst, Roth Capital Partners: Hey, good morning, team. Just curious if you could speak to any demand in sales trends in the first quarter to date. I'm curious specifically in January, I guess, since you probably have the full month of data there. And then any notable changes since the new administration took office. Any context that you can provide around the loss of the Huckabee as well would be helpful.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Yes. Thank you very much, Matt. We have been we have had five consecutive growth quarters and I do not expect there to be a sixth consecutive growth quarter as Q1 is traditionally a slower quarter for us. That said, Q1 will be a record quarter, but for Q4. So it is a very strong quarter.

It will be well above the previous high watermarks that we had last year other than the fourth quarter. There has been nothing really remarkable since the change in administration other than the willingness of more and more platforms to accept our advertising. So we think that that shift is a very positive shift for us. Obviously, by signing up Lara Trump and Charlie Kirk, we're trying to go after more of that audience that voted for President Trump. But we don't see any significant change in demand as a result, one way or the other as a result of the election.

With regard to Governor Huckabee, well, we're sorry to see Mike go. Mike was at TBN, which is a relatively small network. And although his ROAS was excellent, he was a relatively small endorser for us. Didn't was certainly not on the scale of a Sean Hannity or a Glenn Beck. So, while we'll miss him on a personal level, I don't see that there's going to have any significant impact on our numbers.

Matt Koranda, Analyst, Roth Capital Partners: Okay, very helpful. And then the flow through on your EBITDA was pretty impressive for the quarter. Obviously, you can see a lot of that coming from the good gross margin pull through that you guys have mentioned and sort of the production improvements. Curious also on the operating expense side, where you guys are getting the most leverage because you mentioned leaning into marketing. So I'd assume there's not really leverage on that front.

Maybe just discuss how we can kind of think about incremental margins going forward as we head into fiscal twenty twenty five?

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Sure, Matt. Good to talk to you. You're right, we will continue to see our marketing increase throughout the year as we're leaning into the marketing. So I would expect to see that. Our variable selling expenses are remaining at would say is, as we open these retail stores, we do have operating expenses related to those.

So the people, the labor costs associated with it, the lease costs associated with it, and we do expect some time before they really ramp up to full revenue. So if you think about on a quarterly basis, that's probably a $400,000 or $500,000 incremental expense that we have on the retail stores and it's probably a six month timeframe before those get ramped up to full speed.

Matt Koranda, Analyst, Roth Capital Partners: Okay. All right. That's helpful.

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: The rest of the expenses, I mean, you'll see a little bit some incremental. I mean, we've done raises, so you'll just see a few percentage points of increase, but nothing drastic.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Yes. If I could just add, I think the biggest issue is the store openings. So as I mentioned, I was just down in Nashville. We just had the grand opening on Wednesday. We've had staff there for going on two months now.

So we've had people that have been setting up the store, that have been training, that have been traveling to Las Vegas to train. And then sales just started this week. They started to have one to two launchers a day. Las Vegas is up over 10 launchers a day. So we expect Nashville to be there over the next four to six months.

But in the beginning, as with any new business, we expect these to be loss leaders, and that's going to have some negative impact on our operating expense percentage.

Matt Koranda, Analyst, Roth Capital Partners: Okay, fair enough. I wonder if you could maybe just speak a little bit more to the Sportsman's partnership just in terms of the impact you expect on the P and L timing of the rollout. It sounds like 2Q is kind of when we start seeing the 11 initial stores. How quickly could we see the additional 50 that you mentioned, Brian, in the prepared remarks? What do you need to see out of the partnership from the initial 11 to hit that next stage of the 50?

And then maybe just lastly, if you could touch on how this may impact your own store rollout going forward and how we should be thinking about that in light of the partnership?

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Okay. The sports burner store is the amount of time it takes to secure a lease, to get approval from the police department, the fire department, to do the tenant improvements, to hire the personnel. So from the time we select a city to the time that we can open up a store, probably is six months. For Sportsman's Warehouse, where there is already an existing location, already customer flow, there's already space there, there's an archery range and all that needs to be done is the conversion of this space from an archery range into a burn a store, we're looking at three or four weeks to take a location and turn it into an active store. So that's one of the things that's very, very attractive about the deal with Sportsman's Warehouse is that for us to roll out 100 stores could take us multiple years, whereas Sportsman's could frankly roll them out as quickly as twelve months if the numbers are there.

So that brings us down to the question of what is it going to take to roll out additional stores. We think that these stores like Zacks could do $500,000 to $1,000,000 a year in each store. I think Sportsman's is looking at much lower numbers than that honestly. I think that they would be happy rolling these stores out if they were in the $100,000 to $300,000 range per store within a store. And I think in speaking with management there and speaking with the CEO of Sportsman, they're using these 11 stores for them to get comfortable with the concept, but they are fully committed to rolling these out into the full 100 stores as quickly as possible provided that the concept is economically viable.

Matt Koranda, Analyst, Roth Capital Partners: Okay. It makes a lot of sense. I'll leave it there and great quarter guys.

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Thank you. Thanks Matt.

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Next (LON:NXT) question is coming from Jeff Van Sinderen from B. Riley Securities. Your line is now live.

Jeff Van Sinderen, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Good morning, everyone. And just a follow-up on the Sportsman's Warehouse. Have you thought about sort of a timeframe when you can declare success hitting the targets there? Is it six months out from now, nine months out? Any sense you can give us there?

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: We know from our own stores that we're looking at four to six months to really get comfortable that these stores are hitting their stride. Sportsman's Warehouse may happen more quickly than that because we have to drive traffic to our stores. I just set up a billboard campaign in the Greater Nashville area to make people aware of the store and to get them in. We're starting with coffee splitting with Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck to make people aware that there's a store in Nashville. With Sportsman's, you already have significant traffic.

You already have customers in the store. So we would guess that it will happen more quickly. That said, it's not going to happen overnight. I mean, there's going to take some number of months. So I would be I'm hopeful that in the next three to four months, these stores will start to produce profits that would encourage Sportsman's Warehouse to roll them out to other locations.

Okay, great to hear.

Jeff Van Sinderen, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: And then if we could turn to production plans and targets that you have there for a moment, also wondering if there are any shortages and components in your supply chain, and then maybe if you could touch on inventory levels that you expect to maintain as you continue to grow?

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Okay, sure. So as far as production levels, we mentioned that we're up to 24,000 a month and we plan to continue that. We don't have any shortage of parts, so we're keeping on top of that and getting parts in timely. We do expect to grow inventory through the first quarter, maybe partially into the second quarter until we get to the launch of our CL as we are starting production of our CL. As we've mentioned previously, we want to have 30,000 of those produced and ready to go before that product launch, which we expect to be in the summer of this year, so mid year this year.

So that will increase our inventory in the neighborhood of about $5,000,000 we expect.

Jeff Van Sinderen, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Okay. I'll talk to now. And that $5,000,000 is just for the compact launcher?

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Just for the compact launcher.

Jeff Van Sinderen, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: Okay, fair enough. And then I know you guys generally don't provide guidance, but wondering if there's if you want to say anything about what level of revenue growth or gross margin seems attainable in 2025? And then maybe given some of your expenses to ramp retail, perhaps the level of EBITDA margin that seems feasible to aim for?

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Yes. We don't want to give any numerical guidance to the top line, but we can say that it's not going to be the same 100% growth we had in 2024, but it will be very strong double digit growth year. We're already seeing that in Q1 and we expect as we get into Q3 and Q4 with the implementation of the Compact Launcher that we'll see very, very strong growth. In terms of margins, as you could see, we've been seeing increasing margins all the way through last year and we expect that to continue. We expect it to continue for a couple of reasons.

As Laurie pointed out, we've been doing a lot of work to reduce costs. We've been benefiting from economies of scale as we grow the business. And frankly, as we bring out the Compact Launcher, we're going to be bringing out a higher margin product. So as we get into the third and fourth quarter, we expect margins to exceed where we ended up at the end of twenty twenty four. We had talked about just sort of EBITDA margins historically that as we hit $100,000,000 we should be in the mid teens.

As we hit $125,000,000 we should be in the high teens. As we get up to $150,000,000 we should be in the low 20s. And probably a terminal gross margin of somewhere close to 30% that we will hit when we're at the $175,000,000.200000000 dollars mark.

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Okay.

Jeff Van Sinderen, Analyst, B. Riley Securities: That's helpful. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll take the rest offline.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Thank you, Jeff.

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from John Hickman from Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is now live.

John Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Hi. Nice results. Congratulations. Just one question about the Sportsman partnership. Are any of the employees in those stores in a store going to be Bernie employees or are they all going to be be Sportsman's?

What kind of control do you have over their performance?

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Yes, that's a very good question, John. They are not going to be Sportsman's they're not going to be Bernie employees. They are going to be Sportsman's employees. And that's one of the benefits for us. Now we have committed to significant training and it is in our best interest to train.

So we are involved in the design of the store, the look of the store, the feel of the store. We will train all the personnel and we will train them using what we call a T3 or Train the Trainer program, so that each of these employees that we train will then be able to train other employees in the store. Sportsman's Warehouse has committed to having many of their employees in the store be trained to operate the range and to sell burners. So we're going to be very involved. We have also agreed to having burn up personnel on-site at least twice a year in each of the locations and to provide demo days using our trailer and other ways to support sportsmans.

But the real benefit here is that we're able to use the sportsmans footprint and we're able to use the sportsmans balance sheet to grow our business.

John Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. So back to the build out there, I think you said that each of your like the Nashville store and etcetera, that's a $400,000 5 hundred thousand dollars expense. What do you anticipate for the expense for the sportsman's store within a store?

Laurie Kearns, CFO, Verna Technologies: Hi, John, it's Laurie. So just one correction. Our build out of our stores are in the $200,000 to $250,000 range for most of our retail stores, okay. For Sportsman's though, because they already have the store, all they're doing is reconfiguring the space and changing some of the fixtures and furniture and fixtures. And they're estimating the cost to be about $15,000 of which we're going to pay half.

So it's $7,500 per store. This is not a large expense for us.

John Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. And then are they going to carry all your products, your rifles, all the ammo, that kind of thing?

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Their agreement is, as with the Premier dealers, to carry a full representative range of products. That may not mean every single product we carry in every single location, but very, very close. So the intention is to carry everything that sells. And this is part for Sportsman. They're creating a whole personal safety, personal self defense division.

So they've been focused almost exclusively on hunting. Hunting (LON:HTG) is a five month a year season. Personal safety is twelve months a year, three sixty five days a year. And Burnham will sort of be the anchor for this personal safety segment of their marketing campaign. So they do want to carry everything personal safety related.

John Hickman, Analyst, Ladenburg Thalmann: Okay. And I guess that's it for me. Thank you.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Thank you,

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: John. Thank you. We've reached the end of our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over for any further or closing comments.

Brian Ganz, CEO, Verna Technologies: Okay. Kevin, thank you. I appreciate your continued interest in BERNA. And I want to thank all of our investors and customers for your continued support. Thank you very much.

Kevin, Conference Call Operator: Thank Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.

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