Company: LASR
Filing Date: 2025-04-25
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0001124796-25-000043
Chunk: 40

Company: NLIGHT, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-04-25
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 40
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• Joseph Corso, our chief financial officer ("CFO").

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#### 2024 Business Highlights
• Increased revenue from the Aerospace and Defense market by 20% year-over-year to approximately $110 million.

• Increased backlog by 54% year-over-year to approximately $167 million.

• Executed on multiple high-energy laser programs in the directed energy market.

• Launched new high-power programmable lasers for the additive manufacturing market.

• Ended 2024 with over $100 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.

#### Executive Compensation Philosophy
Our executive compensation program is designed to achieve the following three primary objectives:

• Attract, retain and motivate highly skilled individuals based upon their contribution to the success of our company, and that of our stockholders;

• Drive outstanding achievement of business objectives and reinforce our strong pay-for-performance culture; and

• Align our named executive officers’ interests with the long-term interests of our stockholders, with a focus on performance that drives value creation for our stockholders.

Our executive compensation program emphasizes long-term equity compensation as the most significant component of each named executive officer’s compensation, aligning the compensation of our named executive officers with stockholder returns. The only fixed component of our named executive officers’ annual compensation is base salary.

The compensation committee of our board of directors oversees our executive compensation program and seeks to provide compensation opportunities for our executive officers in a manner consistent with our business strategy, competitive market practice, sound corporate governance principles and stockholder interests. The core principle of our executive compensation philosophy is to pay-for-performance.

Our compensation philosophy continues to focus on pay-for-performance. We closely aligned the compensation paid to our named executive officers with achievement of both near-term and long-term financial, operational and strategic objectives. In 2024, we structured our compensation mix such that approximately 90% of the target total direct compensation awarded to our chief executive officer was in the form of equity awards and variable cash incentives and only 10% in the form of base salary. The allocation of shares in our equity awards was one-half time-based and one-half performance-based to reward long-term performance consistent with retention incentives. The graphic below shows the target total direct compensation mix for 2024 for our chief executive officer. The target total direct compensation mix for 2024 reflects actual salary, target cash incentive awards, and the grant date fair value of the annual grant of time-vested and performance-based equity awards, with the performance-based equity valued based