Sono-Tek Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Sonotech year-end fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialists by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Karen Smith with PCG Advisory. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Sonatec released their fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2024 results at 7 a.m. Eastern Time this morning. If you do not have a copy of the release, please go to the company's website at sonatec.com and click the Press Release News tab in the Investors section. The product, market, and geography sales tables on the last page of the release will be part of today's discussion. With me on the call today are Dr. Chris Coccio, Sonatex Executive Chairman, Steve Harshberger, CEO and President, and Steve Bagley, Chief Financial Officer. Before turning the call over to management, I would like to make the following remarks concerning forward-looking statements. Please note that various remarks that may be made on this conference call About future expectations, plans, and prospects for the company constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may vary materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. The company assumes no obligation to update the information contained in this conference call. I would now like to turn the call over to Dr. Chris Coccio, Executive Chairman of Sonotech. Chris, please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you, Kieran, and thank you everyone for joining us. Today we're going to discuss our fourth quarter and full year of fiscal year 2024 results that were released this morning before the market opened. I will begin with some opening remarks and then Steve Bagley, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide a financial review. Steve Harshberger, our new CEO and president, will then go through the business and operational results. Following his comments, we'll open the call for your questions. As a reminder, Sonotech currently holds two earning calls per fiscal year. This is our full-year call for the 12 months ended February 29, 2024. Our next earnings call will be for the six months of fiscal 2025, and that will be in October 2021. of 2024. As many of you already know, and for those that are new to Sonifec, the company developed the revolutionary method of applying precision thin film coatings several decades ago. This proprietary technology involves the use of our advanced high frequency ultrasonic nozzles, and they are incorporated into specialty motion control systems. They are able to achieve uniform micron and nano thin coatings onto our customers' products, Our solutions offer dramatic savings in the raw material, water, and energy usage, and they are environmentally friendly. The principal advantage, though, of our ultrasonic coating system is the ability to apply precision thin films, and these are vitally important in today's world with thousands of products and micro components now requiring a functional or protective coating. The strategic shift that we made several years ago offer more complete solutions has meaningfully broadened our addressable market, and that's resulted in significant growth in our average unit selling prices. Our larger machines now commonly sell for over $300,000, and system prices can reach over a million dollars, and that can significantly impact quarterly revenue. This happened in the second quarter of this past year as supply chain constraints finally subsided, And the trend has continued to the end of our fiscal year. I'm pleased to announce that this morning we reported record breaking revenue for the full year, over 30% higher than a year ago and record breaking backlog for the year ahead. This past year, we also shipped two of our newly developed large platform, sophisticated production lines that together valued nearly 1.9 million and sales reached 19.7 million up from $15.1 million, or a 31% increase year over year. This is also our highest yield level ever. In addition to the record sales and backlog, backlog also increased to $9.1 million, a 7% increase compared to backlog on the previous year. This is in addition to last year's substantial backlog increase over its previous year. This growth was due to our strategic shift towards these large complex coding systems and platforms, and also due to our focus on opening new markets for our unique technology. This includes three main areas that have very strong global growth we've talked about before, microelectronics and semiconductors, medical devices, and alternative or clean energy. We've served these sectors for many years and are continuing to advance our products and systems solutions in these areas for the latest generation technology. Now, clean energy, including fuel cells, green hydrogen generation, carbon capture, and advanced solar cells, are markets we've been providing R&D on pilot lines for close to a decade. We're now experiencing a significant success with these customers as they transition to production scale systems. They have done prior R&D and process development with us, and so that has allowed them to move up the scale now. Over the past year, we've announced over 2.1 million from large orders from repeat customers transitioning to high-volume production systems. This is primarily from the electronics, microelectronics, alternative energy, medical, and industrial sectors. Also in the first half of the year, we experienced our largest order valued at 2.19 million And that is also the largest order from the clean energy sector to date. These orders are the first of our deliberate shift in strategy to large customized systems. Our proprietary ultrasonic atomization technology, where Sonotech began more than 40 years ago, remains the heart of all of our systems. We've been able to achieve this shift through our own R&D work, which we consider to be our lifeblood. We attribute the increase in sales both in the past year and to come a direct result of our investments in R&D with a strong focus on product expansion. And to further support our growth and expansion for these large platform custom engineered systems, we've increased our headcount by approximately 15% this year with a strong focus on personnel to enhance our IT department. We've made continued investments into the front end of the organization to open new markets and applications. We want to ensure that we stay fully staffed and in front of our needs. We're excited that these investments have begun to pay off. Our outlook for growth has been greatly enhanced by the early success of our strategy to shift to larger systems with multiple and repeat orders. Looking ahead to the remainder of this year, we're confident that shipments of new orders will continue to positively impact sales. We're guiding towards a strong first quarter fiscal year 2025. of revenue growth above 30%, and that's against a weaker first quarter last year. We're also guiding towards an 8% to 10% year-over-year revenue growth for fiscal year 2025, ending February 28, 2025, despite strong quarterly comparisons and record shipments in 2024. Thank you, and I'll now turn the call over to Steve Bailey, our CFO, who will provide additional details on our financial results. Steve?