Company: LASR
Filing Date: 2025-04-25
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0001124796-25-000043
Chunk: 3

Company: NLIGHT, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-04-25
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 3
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 and have been incorporated into several significant and long-running defense programs, all of which remain key defense priorities. During 2024, we announced a new $25 million dollar contract for an existing long-running missile program. We’ve also continued to make excellent progress on several classified programs that are expected to transition to low-rate initial production in 2025.

Aligned our Commercial Opportunities to Support Long-term Growth

2024 was another challenging year for our commercial markets as a growing number of our customers faced increased competition from China and global manufacturing demand remained muted. With these headwinds expected to continue, we completed our manufacturing transition out of China, reallocated critical engineering resources into defense, and refocused and rationalized our investments within our commercial markets to the highest growth opportunities, such as metal additive manufacturing.

We continue to realize strong synergies between our commercial and defense technologies and markets. For example, our proprietary laser diodes are the fundamental building blocks for both our commercial lasers and our high energy directed energy lasers and these capabilities have enabled us to lead the world with the highest demonstrated power of over 300 kW.

Moreover, in metal additive manufacturing we are benefiting directly from our deep engagement in the aerospace & defense markets. Several of our aerospace & defense customers are actively implementing metal additive manufacturing to accelerate prototyping timelines, build resiliency into their supply chains and create durable domestic manufacturing capabilities for next generation munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles.

#### 2024 Financial Summary
Revenue from our aerospace & defense markets grew 20% year-over-year and represented more than 55% of total revenue, up from 44% last year. Offsetting this growth was a decline in our commercial markets. We continue to monitor our operating expenses and capital outlays closely and we have reallocated resources to areas of the business that are aligned with our long-term growth objectives. Our balance sheet remains strong, with over $100 million of cash and investments, and we believe we possess the financial flexibility to fund our near-term operations while positioning ourselves to benefit from the long-term opportunities we see in the aerospace & defense markets. Finally, we ended the year with $167 million of funded backlog, an increase of 55% compared to December 31, 2023, and we are executing against contracts with $399 million of aggregate value.

#### Looking Forward
In summary, 2024 was an important year for nLIGHT with significant milestones achieved, particularly in our aerospace & defense markets, where revenue grew to more than 60% of our total fourth quarter sales and established itself as