Ocean Power Technologies, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Ocean Power Technologies fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2022 conference call. A webcast of this call is also available on the company's website at www.oceanpowertechnologies.com. This conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after its completion. On the call today are Dr. Philip Stratman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Powers, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Joseph DiPietro, Controller, Treasurer, and Principal Accounting Officer. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'm now pleased to introduce Joseph DiPietro.

After the market closed yesterday, we issued our earnings press release and filed our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended April 30th, 2022. All OPT public filings are available on the SEC website and within the investor relations section of the OPT website. This call will include forward-looking statements that are within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may include financial projections or other statements of the company's plans, objections, expectations, or intentions. These statements are based on assumptions made by management regarding future circumstances over which the company may have little or no control and involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Additional information about these risks and uncertainties can be found in the company's Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. The company disclaims any obligation or intention to update the forward-looking statements made on this call. Finally, please note that we posted an updated investor presentation on our IR website. Please take a moment to review it as it provides a nice overview of our company and strategy. Now I am pleased to introduce Dr. Philip Stratman.

Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone. Our fiscal 2022 proved to be a transformative year for us and was filled with a number of important accomplishments. We identified and pursued new revenue streams. We defined a clear strategy to establish our leadership position in offshore monitoring of assets in areas of our oceans. And we solidified our executive team with key additions in the areas of finance, sales and marketing, engineering, and human resources. Your investment is in excellent hands. Finally, 2022 was a year of meaningful progress for OPT as many elements of our strategy came together. This strategy has us positioned well, and we believe fiscal 2023 should be the first of many years where we are operating the business on a solid foundation and are executing on our mission and plan for growth. To that end, I'd like to give you a quick update on the three components of our strategy. First is data as a service, where we are focused on being the leader of offshore data collection, integration, analytics, and real-time communication. Our primary revenue drivers within data as a service are expected to be our maritime domain awareness solution and our WAM-V autonomous surface vessels. Throughout fiscal 2022, we invested considerable time, capital and resources towards the development of our proprietary cutting edge MDA technology, and we are close to having it ready for its commercial launch. Our MDA solution is currently undergoing testing and is expected to be operational by the end of Q2 of fiscal 2023. Our software will enable data to be processed on board power buoys, WAMVs, and many other non-OPT offshore assets. Our team is thrilled at the capabilities of our technology, and we are excited as we conduct our initial meetings with potential customers for subscriptions. Our selling proposition is strong. We will provide a wide range of valuable data, which will help customers reduce costs and eliminate human error. Our autonomous systems enable 24-7 data collection that can automatically be analyzed by artificial intelligence systems, materially increasing the granularity of data to improve decision making. Since a sizable portion of our WAMV sales activity is expected to fall under our data as a service segment, I wanted to provide a short update on our integration efforts. We've had a nice start to working with the MAR leadership team to integrate their business with ours. HR and finance are now on OPT systems We're fostering a continuing learning culture through engineering exchanges, and the commercial teams have started focusing on cross-selling opportunities. Recent customer contract wins include Brigham Young University, Nippon Kayu, Australian Government Department of Defense, SD Hudson, and the Applied Research Lab at the University of Hawaii. One of the final areas of integration is underway, the transition of manufacturing to our New Jersey facility, which started recently. Once completed, We believe we will improve efficiency and reduce costs for the manufacturing of future WAMVs. Second is power as a service, which are solutions that deliver value to customers by utilizing our managed power platforms of power buoys, hybrid power buoys, and subsea batteries. Each can be purchased or leased. Additionally, during the past year, we developed a model where the power buoy or hybrid is owned and operated by OPT or an affiliate, who then sells the power produced to the customer for a recurring fee. To date, our focus has been on building awareness of our new offering and growing our pipeline for customers. Feedback from potential customers suggests this enables them to utilize our systems for short-duration projects and being able to procure these services from OPEX budgets. We're now actively working on converting these to orders. Finally, we have our strategic consulting services. Our team managing this part of our business had an excellent year. We're quickly becoming recognized as the go-to firm for offshore energy-related engineering consulting services. We are best known for simulation engineering, software engineering, concept design, and motions monitoring, all of which help our customers increase operational efficiencies and reduce risk. Collectively, the three components of our strategy delivered $1.76 million of revenues. While this was a nice move in the right direction, it is far from where we want to be. We expect to continue our momentum into fiscal 2023. We expect to generate up to 9 million of order activity in fiscal 2023, much of which is expected to be reflected in revenue for the year. This will be good progress towards having the requisite revenue level to deliver sustained profitability for our company. Before I turn it over to Bob for a discussion on financials, I would like to provide an update on our top three projects in process throughout the world. First is our project in Chile with EGP, which primarily falls under Power as a Service. During fiscal 2022, deployment of the PB3 was completed and it has operated continuously since installation. Ongoing installation and commissioning activities of the OpenSea Lab subsea equipment continues into fiscal 2023. Second is our work with the US Naval Postgraduate School SLAMA Initiative to support its autonomous offshore defense network. Details remain classified, but I can tell you that we made progress and continue to support our customer with this important demonstration. Third is our offshore demonstration of our MDAS off the coast of New Jersey. To date, we've collected more than 2,000 radar and AIS tracks from this demonstration, which are being used to refine the design of our MDAS. Initial field demonstration of our MDAS software began in Q1 of fiscal year 2023 and will be ongoing. Fiscal 2022 was an important year for OPT, and successful in many ways. Most importantly, it has set the foundation for where we are headed. We have the expanded revenue sources, we have the team, and we believe we have the best offshore solutions and products in the world. We are excited to demonstrate the potential of a focused and integrated OPT, bringing to market resident and roaming autonomous platforms. With that, let me turn the call over to Bob to discuss the financial results.