Company: LIDRW
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001437749-25-004906
Chunk: 582

Company: AEye, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 4
Chunk 582
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 the launch of our new product, Apollo, in 2024, we have seen renewed interest from Non-Automotive customers across a broad range of sectors and are actively engaged on multiple opportunities.  

In early 2024, we engaged LITEON as our Tier 1 automotive supplier and are actively working with them to bring our products to market. As part of this initiative, LITEON has committed to building and delivering Apollo B0 samples to us by the first quarter of 2025, marking a significant milestone in our product development. This partnership has enabled us to leverage their manufacturing expertise to produce high-quality samples that meet stringent performance standards, which is a critical step towards scaling production and delivering our advanced lidar solutions to the market. In May 2024, we announced a strategic partnership with ATI and LighTekton Co., Ltd to manufacture and distribute our products in China. This collaboration opens access to a potential $2.5 billion market opportunity. By leveraging ATI's and LighTekton's extensive networks and manufacturing capabilities, we aim to accelerate our market penetration and deliver our advanced lidar solutions to a broader audience. We have also made substantial progress in our collaboration efforts with Nvidia, demonstrating significant advances in the high-speed and long-range detection performance of our lidar systems, which we believe puts us on track for future integration with their Hyperion platform. Given these engagements are relatively recent, there is no guarantee that these endeavors will be successful.

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We believe our revenue and profitability will also be dependent upon our success in licensing our technology to Tier 1 automotive suppliers, such as our current Tier 1 partner, LITEON, or our previous partner Continental, which represented 70% of 2023 revenue, and these partners securing program awards from OEMS and scaling to high volume production of our lidar sensors. Delays in autonomy programs by OEMs that we are currently or plan to be working with through our Tier 1 partners could result in us being unable to achieve our revenue and profitability targets in the time frame we anticipate, or at all.

Restructuring

In 2023, we implemented a revised strategic plan, which focused on key products and critical customer engagements and aligned our operations with evolving business needs by focusing on our transition from research and development to the commercialization of our automotive products, while winding down our legacy Non-Automotive product and reducing fixed operating costs. In August 2024, fixed operating costs were further reduced by the