Enovix Corporation

Enovix Corporation

ENVXยทNASDAQ

$8.23

-4.1%
IndustrialsElectrical Equipment & Parts

Enovix Corporation designs, develops, and manufactures lithium-ion batteries. The company was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.

At a Glance

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Market Cap$1.80B
EPS-0.7500
P/E Ratio-10.97
Earnings Date07/30/2026

Earnings Call Transcript

ENVX โ€ข 2025 โ€ข Q4

Operator
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Enovix Corporation Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's program will be recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Robert Lahey, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Robert Lahey
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Enovix Corporation's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. With me today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Raj Talluri; and Chief Financial Officer, Ryan Benton. Raj and Ryan will provide remarks followed by Q&A. Before we begin, please note that today's call contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on current expectations and may differ materially from actual future results due to various factors. For a discussion of these risks, please refer to the disclosures in today's press release and our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can find these materials on our website at ir.enovix.com. All statements made on this call are as of today, February 25, 2026, and we undertake no obligation to update them, except as required by law. Additionally, during the call, we may reference non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the materials posted on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Raj.
Raj Talluri
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. The fourth quarter represented continued progress as we transition from qualification into early commercialization across multiple end markets. First, we continued advancing smartphone qualification for the AI-1 platform with our lead mobile customer. Second, engagement expanded across smart eyewear and other AI-powered devices. We view smart eyewear as an earlier commercialization pathway for AI-1 due to lower qualification barriers and thresholds. We are currently preparing production to support initial high-volume demand from our lead smart eyewear customer. Third, defense and industrial programs continue to provide revenue, operational validation and manufacturing execution experience as we prepare for consumer scale production. Finally, we ended the year with a strong liquidity position, giving us flexibility to execute our commercialization road map while maintaining disciplined capital allocation, including recently authorized share repurchase program. Overall, we believe 2025 positions us well for the next phase, moving from qualification towards commercialization across smartphones, smart eyewear and additional defense applications, and we'll walk through that progress today. For the full year 2025, revenue grew 38% year-over-year to $31.8 million, with the defense shipments remaining our largest contributor and batteries for naval munitions specifically being our top product in Q4. Full year non-GAAP gross margin improved to 23%, reflecting higher production volumes and improved mix shift towards higher-margin defense batteries following our April 2025 asset acquisition. We ended the year with $621 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, supporting qualification completion, commercial scale-up and additional potential strategic transactions. To support this next phase, we strengthened our operational leadership. Kihong Park, or KH, as he prefers to be called, now leads our global manufacturing organization, bringing decades of battery production experience and deep operational knowledge from our South Korea platform to our Malaysia scale-up efforts. We also welcomed Ed Casey to lead advanced manufacturing engineering, adding significant expertise in scaling complex high-volume manufacturing environments across global networks. Together, this leadership alignment reinforces our focus on manufacturing execution as we prepare for high-volume production. We continue to improve yield and throughput across Fab2. As we discussed in our previous call,
Ryan Benton
Thanks, Raj. First, a few highlights on the fourth quarter results. Fourth quarter revenue was $11.3 million, a record for Enovix, up 16% year-over-year and above the top end of our guidance range of $10.5 million. This performance was driven by continued strength in defense and industrial shipments out of Korea. Non-GAAP gross profit was $2.9 million for a non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 26%. While margins can fluctuate quarter-to-quarter based upon product mix, Q4 benefited from higher volumes and operational improvements in Korea. Non-GAAP operating expenses were consistent with our planned investment levels, reflecting continued investment in smartphone and smart eyewear qualification programs as well as Fab2 readiness. Non-GAAP loss from operations was $28.9 million, modestly better than the guidance range of $30 million to $33 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share attributable to Enovix was a loss of $0.14, also better than the guidance range of a loss of between $0.16 and $0.20. With respect to the balance sheet, we ended the year with approximately $621 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, providing substantial liquidity to execute on our commercial plans as well as enabling us to evaluate strategic opportunities from a position of strength. Additionally, the Board authorized a share repurchase program, reflecting confidence in our long-term strategy and adding another tool to our capital allocation framework as we focus on long-term shareholder value. Turning to the full year results. For the full year 2025, revenue totaled $31.8 million, a record for the company, representing 38% year-over-year growth. This growth reflects sustained execution in defense and industrial markets, while new products in the smartphone and smart eyewear markets advance towards commercialization. Full year non-GAAP gross margin improved to 23%, benefiting from higher volumes and demonstrating substantial progress in manufacturing execution. Capital expenditures for the year were disciplined and aligned with our staged manufacturing expansion plans. Overall, we exited 2025 in a stronger financial and operational position than we entered it, with growing revenue, improving margins and substantial liquidity to execute upon our road map. Now turning to Q1 2026 guidance. For Q1, we expect revenue in the range of $6.5 million to $7.5 million, reflecting normal seasonality and program timing of defense shipments. We expect non-GAAP loss from operations between $29 million and $32 million, reflecting continued investment in product qualification and manufacturing readiness. We expect capital expenditures between $9 million and $11 million, primarily related to Fab2 equipment. Actual cash payments in Q4 were lower than previously guided due to the timing of equipment and vendor payments. The majority of those payments are expected to occur in the first half of 2026. This is primarily timing, though we also made a couple of intentional near-term adjustments. Coincident with the operations leadership transition, we made 2 adjustments to our capital plan. First, we deferred initiation of the NPI line in Korea to allow KH time to fully evaluate priorities and sequencing. Second, given the high demand for products from our Korea factory, we are accelerating adding incremental capacity there. This is a relatively modest investment supported by high customer demand and opportunities. On the M&A front, to provide a little bit more color there, we continue to actively evaluate a range of opportunities, both smaller and larger, that could accelerate commercialization or strengthen our manufacturing and technology position. We will only deploy capital with a focused and disciplined approach, especially with respect to strategic fit and price. And with that, I think we're ready to take questions. Operator?
Operator
[indiscernible] Q&A session. Please note that this call is being recorded. Before we go to live questions, we're going to read the 2 most highly voted questions submitted by shareholders ahead of this call during the call registration. The first question is, how does your current strategy differentiate Enovix from competitors?
Raj Talluri
Thank you for that question. So Enovix, we use 100% active silicon anode. Most of our competitors use graphite for the anode. Silicon anodes can store much more lithium. So we are able to provide much higher energy density because of that. One of the problems with replacing graphite with silicon is that the silicon tends to swell when using a battery when doing a charge and discharge. We've got an architectural advantage where we figured out how to enable the silicon anode from not swelling while maintaining the energy density advantage. That is our main advantage, and that is how we differ from most of our competition because we provide much higher energy density due to using 100% active silicon anodes.
Operator
Thanks. The second question is, at our current burn rate, how long is our cash runway? And under what conditions will we need to raise additional capital?
Ryan Benton
I'll take that one, of course. First, we ended the year with approximately $621 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. So we're operating from a position of strength, in my opinion. Second, I'd caution against thinking about runway purely in terms of static burn rate because our spending is tied to a very specific qualification and commercialization milestone set. As those programs progress, the working capital and capital expense profiles will evolve as well. As we said in the prepared remarks, we believe we have sustained liquidity -- substantial liquidity to execute on our commercialization strategy without needing to raise capital in the near term. That said, as we've discussed before, beyond that, we will always evaluate capital allocation options such as strategic M&A opportunistically but with process rigor.
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Mark Shooter with William Blair.
Mark Shooter
Can you hear me?
Raj Talluri
Yes, go ahead.
Mark Shooter
Great. So I appreciate you getting into the details and geeking out with us a bit on the smartphone C-rates test requirements. The 0.7C rate life cycle test is definitely overkill for smartphones, but it's an incumbent standard, and they're notoriously sticky and difficult to change once established. So I'm wondering in your engagements with Honor, how receptive were they when you suggested the change? And given that cycle life and energy density are always paired to trade-offs, would Honor take a formulation that hits that 0.7 rate cycle life spec with a slightly lower energy density?
Raj Talluri
Yes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for the question. Yes, I think the first thing is to -- the reason I showed some of the material in this talk is to actually show that most of the use cases in the smartphones, as the batteries get bigger and bigger and more and more capacity, are under 0.2C discharge, which basically means that we have a battery that now we believe under 0.2C average discharge rate, goes over 1,000 cycles. So we essentially -- we feel we have a battery that meets the requirements of the smartphone market. Now as I said, one of the challenges is if you want to test if the battery meets the requirements at the -- how the normally battery is used in the phone, it's going to take a year to at least to run that because if you run at 0.2C, it takes a long time. So customers typically use a higher rate of discharge, like 0.7C, to cut the amount of time it takes to test. This is very similar to people used to use a burn-in test, for example, for chips, high-temperature ovens, try to find the early failures. When you change technology from graphite batteries to silicon anode batteries, silicon anode batteries behave differently when you discharge them very fast, in this 0.7C. So Honor and our other smartphone customers, we've talked to them, they understand that. They realize that this test is a proxy and an accelerated test and not a true test. But, like you said, this is a test they have been using. So we are in discussions with them. We see 3 pathways forward. One is, we're able to convince them that this is not a real-life test and the real-life test is really 0.2C, and we can get a waiver on less cycle life for 0.7C, for example. By the way, this has got nothing to do with energy density. It's purely about cycle life testing. So it's not like they need to take a lower energy density. They just have to take a lower cycle life on 0.7C, which is not a real test, an accelerated test. The second one is we have to find together with them another accelerated test that is more representative, if you will, for silicon anodes. And we have some ideas on what that is, and we are discussing with them on that. The third one is we'll just have to modify our electrochemistry just to pass this test at 0.7C. So we are working on all 3 of those. Ultimately, there is a lot of interest from our customers in wanting to use our batteries because of the higher energy density we provide. And the road map, even higher energy densities because of 100% silicon anode. And those conversations are going well. But ultimately, we need to solve this passing of this test to a way where they and us both are comfortable, that in the real-life use case, when ultimately the battery is put in the phone, it's going to do really well and everyone is happy with the performance.
Mark Shooter
I appreciate all the color there. If I can switch over to the opportunity in smart glasses. In the presentation, you gave a lot of information there on the TAM as well. The performance advantage with Enovix's cell and technology goes up, but the battery application requirements get easier. So I can see this is your faster commercialization path. But you did mention an initial production demand in your -- in the release statement. So I mean, should we think about that as a purchase order? Or is that a next step? And can you frame what the revenue opportunity might be for '26? Or is this a '27 story?
Raj Talluri
Yes. Good question. So as you alluded, when the battery gets smaller but still the energy requirements or capacity requirements are high, we have a disproportionate advantage because the smaller it is, the efficiency we have is more -- better compared to our competition because the additional stuff we put in there for holding the cell from not expanding is not as much of a penalty, right? So that's why I think it's much -- we are much more competitive there. And also the cycle life requirements are much, much lesser. They don't need to do 1,000 cycles because people probably change their glasses much quickly. So those 2 are very good. And also, the battery in smart glasses is the limiting factor. I mean, if you guys actually buy some of the smart glasses in the market today and start using them, you'll find that almost none of them come all day. Smartphones come all day, but most of these things will die in multiple hours. So a better battery makes the product. That's why there's a lot of interest from our customers on using our battery. And also, there's lots of different kinds of applications, lots of different kinds of products. This is what I mean by -- there could be sport glasses, there could be utility glasses, there could be fashion glasses. And as I mentioned, when Android XR ecosystem comes, there will be even more products using that. So that's why the TAM is now suddenly much larger we expect it to be in the next few years than we ever thought before. So I think that's why we are very excited by this market and the fact that we can get there. Yes, you absolutely should think of the question you asked as a purchase order, and we are manufacturing them now to our lead customer. We are very excited by that. The whole team -- I was in Penang last week. The whole team is focused on executing that and building those products and setting it out. Initial volumes will be lower just because they're just starting. But I think that '27, '28, we expect the market to really grow and be meaningful for us. So we're excited by that.
Ryan Benton
Yes. If I can just jump in and chime in. Had an old boss, used to say, "All dollars are not equal." It's a very important order for us.
Operator
The next question comes from George Gianarikas with Canaccord Genuity.
George Gianarikas
Incredible level of detail in presentation. Appreciate it. So maybe first question, you pointed to sort of a little bit of an issue with the electrode dicing and the manufacturing process getting yields up there. How much have you been talking with your potential future customers around fixing that issue maybe together in anticipation of ramping production towards the end of this year?
Raj Talluri
Yes. I think, firstly, as I mentioned, the yields on almost -- on all steps are above 80%, as you saw in our -- 80% or above, as I mentioned. On the dicing side, they're close to 80% but not quite there in fourth quarter. But this quarter to date, we're at 80%. So we feel confident that as we make progress, it will sort itself out. But that's because we just started making 2 batteries, right? We just started making the smartphone battery and smart eyewear battery. We've been sampling a lot of batteries last year. We're now focused on 2 of them, one on Agility Line, one on H-volume line -- high-volume line, and we'll continue to work on each state to get it better. Our customers have visited our factories. They have seen it. We've got man through multiple customer audits. We have enough supply to meet all the requirements for 2026. And we're looking at various options to increase the throughput and get even more cost-effective than laser dicing methods to actually get the volumes up. So yes, a lot of focus on that, and we are working with our customers on that.
George Gianarikas
And maybe with regard to the drone opportunity, can you sort of talk about the different variations of chemistries that you have to work with them? I'm assuming these are silicon-doped cells, not 100% silicon that you're approaching the market with first. And so how many different chemistries do you need to approach that market? And do you need, like, any additional salespeople to sort of attack it?
Raj Talluri
Yes. Great question. This, we have been making. We haven't really talked about it too much in the past. We have been making very high performance, high rate of discharge cells because we were selling into -- a lot into the Korean military from our Nonsan facility. And some of the requests came from drone batteries, and we started making those. What we find now is, with the market expanding fast, because as you guys have seen in the more recent political situations, there's lots of drones being deployed, both in commercial and also in military, we have now combined -- used some of our knowledge on using 100% silicon anodes with our Nonsan team. And now we dope those batteries also with silicon anode -- with silicon -- the graphite with silicon and to increasing amounts. As I mentioned before, when we put more and more silicon, the cells, the batteries swell. So that problem hasn't gone away. But since they are inside things like drones, even if those cells swell 10%, 15% or more, there's space inside to accommodate that. So we have now found that we can make high gravimetric energy batteries that do swell a little bit, but still good within the application. Whereas in a smartphone, if you swell, it's not acceptable because it's very space constrained. So they are both -- so in that sense, I think it's been a really good thing for us. As I mentioned, we have a strong road map now, and you will see us sampling much higher watt hours per kilogram cells this year and just continuing to increase that through next year. And we have a lot of customers now helping us with that, too.
Operator
Our next question comes from Colin Rusch with Oppenheimer.
Colin Rusch
Can you guys hear me okay?
Ryan Benton
Yes, sir.
Raj Talluri
Yes, Colin, go ahead.
Colin Rusch
So guys, exciting that you're moving into the drones. Can you talk a little bit about the form factors that you're working on there as well as the diversity of electrolyte and binder materials and binder processes that you can -- you feel comfortable talking about at this point? Just want to get a sense of the full ecosystem here and potential product diversification that you might see within that opportunity.
Raj Talluri
Yes, sure. Again, like I said, it's a pretty big market and all of them are not same, right? There are subsea drones. There are aerial drones. There are big aerial drones that carry a lot of weight. There are smaller ones that carry some munitions and maybe onetime use and just used for a few times. So we have different chemistries and different electrolytes to address that market. Here, this is one of those areas where we can trade off cycle life for energy density, for weight and so on because you don't need to charge them 1,000 cycles, right? So that's really not a requirement here. 300 is plenty. So suddenly, a lot more opportunities open up for us in terms of the electrochemistries we use. And our team in Korea has been doing this for a long time. So we have multiple chemistries going after that, some purely graphite, some graphite doped with silicon, a different kind of cathodes. So multiple form factors, multiple products. But we understand this market pretty well. And the other important thing is, in this market, having your own factory is really a big deal because manufacturing -- that's something that our customers tell us that the fact that we own our factories and we can make them in Korea or Malaysia is a big advantage compared to some of our competition who actually have to use contract manufacturing in China and other places. So these are sensitive areas where having our own captive manufacturing helps us quite a bit.
Ryan Benton
And I'll add to it. I think I was going to say part of the question, I do expect that we'll add to the sales and business development organization to support that. So it's kind of the time to build that group out.
Raj Talluri
That's right, yes.
Colin Rusch
Great. And given what's going on in the U.S. in terms of trying to migrate manufacturing and secure supply chains back into the U.S. over the next few years, even from Korea, can you talk about some of your capital planning on a multiyear basis as you enter that market in terms of having to have some localized or regionalized supply in the Western Hemisphere to serve some of the [ U.S. military ]?
Raj Talluri
Yes. I mean, at this point, as Ryan mentioned, we were fortunate to acquire this facility in Korea last year from SolarEdge that added 300,000 square foot of total capacity we have -- factory we have in Korea now, with a very capable team that's been building batteries for defense for like 20 years and industrial applications. So we have a large footprint there, and we are now going to invest more into that this year to get more capacity there. And again, so far, I think manufacturing in Korea, our manufacturing in Malaysia seems perfectly acceptable. We'll continue to see if it makes sense to bring something into the U.S., but we are quite -- our customers are quite comfortable right now with those 2 facilities.
Operator
The next question is from Jeff Osborne with TD Cowen.
Jeffrey Osborne
I appreciate all the detail on the call so far. I wanted to know, Raj, relative to the last earnings call, 3 months ago or so, the 0.7C metric that you mentioned, is that new? Because you referenced sort of a 4-month testing period. I'm just curious like when the parameters changed? And then when that -- I think you referenced a 4-month sort of shot clock to proceed through the testing process and procedures. Did the 4 months start 3 months ago and you'll know next month? Or did you get that new homework assignment, so to speak, in the past few weeks?
Raj Talluri
No, that's always been there as a requirement. And our thinking was that we will figure out a way to -- I mean, we will pass that requirement also. But I think what we find now is with 100% silicon anode batteries, 0.2C requirement is something we can pass because that's -- we have data now that shows that. When you discharge a battery like 100% silicon anode battery at 0.7C rapidly, which is not a real use case, as I mentioned, you just do it for convenience. It doesn't behave like the graphite batteries do. It behaves differently. So in that sense, it's one of those cases where the accelerated test itself has to be adapted a little bit for the kind of battery we are using. And we showed this to our customers, and they understand it. So we're not discussing what the right way to resolve this is, right? So it's not a new homework assignment. The results is what we have now, is we've solved the 0.2C problem, which I believe is a real problem in terms of how a battery is used in the phone. Now we are working on how to resolve the 0.7C accelerated test in a way that both us and our customers are comfortable.
Jeffrey Osborne
And do you think that can still be done in a 4-month window that started at some point this quarter? I'm just trying to understand like when do you expect, knowing what you know now, to pass the Honor test, so to speak?
Raj Talluri
Yes. Like I said, I think there are 3 pathways for us. One is, we have results now on 0.7C that don't go all the way to the cycle life that they want. But we are talking to them about how real is this, like it's a proxy test, can we get comfortable? And for example, get a waiver that you pass these many cycles, it's okay as long as the 0.2C is holding 1,000 cycles. That's one pathway. That may be the shortest one. The second one, maybe we come up with a different accelerator test, which we believe is more representative or better -- makes them comfortable that silicon anodes, if we accelerate test like this, they behave like how they would in real-world use case. We are working on that, which is a different testing protocol. And the third one is they say, "No, you just got to pass this." In which case, we'll have to change the electrochemistry and find a way to pass this, which we have some ideas on how to do. The team is working on that. That might take longer. So depending upon which one we are able to convince them, we'll gate how much the time is. So we do believe that one of these things we'll be able to convince them before the end of the year and get some volume.
Jeffrey Osborne
Got it. And then maybe for Ryan, just given Raj's answer on the 3 different outcomes there, as it relates to sort of modeling the business over the next few quarters, I know you only give formal guidance 1 quarter out, but I assume we should think about eyewear as the main driver outside of the Routejade facility for the next 6 months or so? That is part A of the question. And part B, can you just remind us of what you expect seasonality to be for defense? You've got a pretty precipitous decline in Q1. How should we think about that rebounding in Q2 to through the rest of the year?
Ryan Benton
Yes. Thanks, Jeff. The first part of your question, the answer is yes. So for the first -- the near term, that's -- you heard it right. So smart eyewear is the more near-term opportunity. And then the second part of your question in terms of seasonality, exactly right. So if you look at the same pattern in terms of revenue that we had last year, Q1 tends to be soft based on the order pattern of these long-term defense contracts and then the back half of the year tends to be much stronger. Kind of evidenced by our Q4 that we just printed, which was record quarterly revenue.
Jeffrey Osborne
Got it. And then maybe last one quickly for you. Just CapEx for the year, should we think about $50-plus million? Or what's the expectation?
Ryan Benton
We don't give -- apologies, we don't give guidance beyond the quarter. I think we gave guidance for just Q1 and just speak broadly about Q1 in general, we talked about the HVM-2 line. We've already started placing some orders for some of the long lead, but we'll reevaluate all of our plans now with KH, who's in this new role of Head of Operations, who's wonderful to work with, and we'll just be smart and prudent how we phase those orders out over the year.
Operator
The next question comes from Will Peterson with JPMorgan.
William Peterson
I wanted to come back to the question about your Korean operations. Can you give us a sense for what the combined, the 2, Routejade and the other one, can support in terms of megawatt hours or revenue? Just trying to get a sense of the run rate you could support at sort of max capacity? And then how much capacity do you plan to add? And what -- can you give us any sort of sense on what investment you're considering?
Ryan Benton
Do you want to take that or me?
Raj Talluri
Go ahead.
Ryan Benton
I'll go. Again, with that, we haven't given out specific numbers in terms of megawatts, but we -- I think we've talked publicly about how this is a facility that will support significantly higher revenue streams, maybe 2x, and we're investing -- we're making decisions in terms of deploying capital right now, which would incrementally add to that. Again, I don't want to quote an exact number, but it's -- we recognize what a great opportunity we have here in some of these markets that we've talked to, and we've got a great team to support. So we're starting to invest dollars. But again, the -- I think you can see the type of numbers that we've invested in Korea over the last couple of years compared to the dollars that we're investing in PEP-2, they're relatively small, but they're really important in terms of the ROI that they can return both in terms of dollars and strategic return.
Raj Talluri
Yes. One other color I'd add is, we have a much larger facility now. Like I said, we have a fairly large facility that we acquired with a lot of machines. So we will be adding incrementally and in a scalable manner. So some of it that we acquired is usable. For example, we have a huge coater that we acquired from there that the coating -- we don't have to add new capacity, and coater is very expensive. But then we can add more to the dicing and stacking in a scalable manner. So we don't have to do it all at once. The facility is there, so we can prudently add it as and when we see the demand and the qualifications materialize. So it's been very fortuitous that we got this facility and now the demand is coming to us.
William Peterson
I appreciate that. And then coming to the key, I guess, your first smartphone customer, trying to get a sense for the key learnings from the chemistry reformulation process. And how many more, I guess, options do you have with this customer? And you gave, I guess, a pretty clear example of cycle life. I guess is there differences in requirements between the various customers? Anything you can kind of give us to better understand what, I guess, opportunities you have ahead?
Raj Talluri
Yes. I mean, look, the learning here is this for me, right? I think the learning is we wanted to give a lot more color on this call and our report on exactly what it is. And what we have learned over this is the smartphone requirements are very, very difficult because this is the largest market for portable batteries and consumer electronics, great margins because they provide clear value, huge TAM. But when you make a battery for that, the rest of the markets are much easier because this is the toughest one. And to replace an existing graphite battery and existing graphite battery ecosystem with 100% silicon anode battery, one is, meeting all the requirements. Second is, helping and learning with the customers on accelerated tests or other tests that they have put together, have to be updated a little bit for this particular kind of technology. It was kind of like thinking about when you started to add -- I don't know, I remember in my past, we added fingerprint sensors to phones. So now you've got to face ID. It's completely different, right? So it's still a biometric authenticating system, but the test cases are different and the way you use is different. So whenever you introduce a new technology, you have to work with the customer in enabling that. The reason that the customers are interested in, although it's different, is because we can provide an energy density road map that's not possible to do by just graphite batteries. And that is an absolute requirement. As I mentioned when I first took this job, the AI use case is only getting more and more and the demands are getting higher and higher. And now as I mentioned, I think a few calls ago that I expect these batteries to go to 10,000 milliamp hours, and now you see that. And they can't keep getting bigger because the phones can't get any bigger. So the customers are highly motivated to help us get this technology to market. But when you totally change the graphite anode to silicon anode, here, we have to work with them to make that to qualify. So if you look at the progress we've made, it's tremendous. I mean, I think we showed -- we have specs of like 75 different specs, and we passed most of them. So we are converging, and it's been a fantastic learning. But at the same time, other markets like eyewear are much easier to do because of this. And there are so many other markets like that, that are much easier, like if you think about wearable cameras and so many other markets where AI at the edge is really creating, there are great opportunities for us once we get this smartphone battery done or even before as we've gained a lot of technology advancements in the last few years working with our smartphone customers.
Operator
Our next question comes from Derek Soderberg with Cantor Fitzgerald.
Derek Soderberg
I was curious if switching out the dicing technology sort of resets any part of the battery qualification process. Obviously, your customers want to make sure you guys can scale and putting aside any of the cycle life testing, might the change to the dicing technology push back that qualification process at all?
Raj Talluri
Look, any time you have a customer qualify one particular product, if you change some steps within it, we will need to communicate what those steps are and what it changes, and we will need to run some form of qualification again. That's just the way it is. Even when you move from one fab to the other, you got to do that. But the way we would do it is, these are all by different zones. For example, dicing is
Derek Soderberg
Got it. And then just a quick follow-up. Are there any remaining technical milestones to shipping commercial volumes in the back half of the year for the augmented reality market?
Raj Talluri
Any technical milestones was your question?
Ryan Benton
For smart eyewear.
Raj Talluri
Yes. So I mean, look, we now have seen the products from our customers with our battery in them. Very exciting. We saw a few at CES. We saw a lot more in private demos. The performance is fantastic. They really like it. They really like what it's able to do and what the AI is able to do. We don't see any big technical obstacles. But this is a new market. It's a new application. So the applications are evolving. So they are doing testing of different applications. And as and when they find them, we'll figure out how to adjust it. We did learn about one thing after we first sampled in terms of how to -- different rates and different pulses and so on, and we quickly adapted that, and now we have a new battery that meets that. So my team is very capable of quickly reacting to those now. But right now, the battery we have, we feel meets all the requirements. That's why we got a production PO, yes.
Derek Soderberg
The next question is from Alek Valero with Loop Capital.
Alek Valero
This is Alek on for Ananda. So my first question is, what is a good way to think about the cadence of testing and production over the next few years for smartphone, eyewear, PCs and drones? Additionally, what do the capacity needs look like over that time frame? I have a quick follow-up.
Raj Talluri
Cadence of testing, how do you mean by that? Maybe you can ask a little bit better. In terms of timing you mean, how long it takes or...
Alek Valero
Yes. I guess what's the timing of the phases of the testing?
Raj Talluri
Yes. So my experience in the last 3 years has been that typically, we provide a standard size cell to the customers that one we have. And they give us a set of requirements in terms of cycle life, energy density, rate of charge, discharge, swelling requirements and so on. And they'll do a bench level test of that. That takes a few months. When they're comfortable with that, they come back to us and ask us, hey, we want a particular -- if they are happy with that particular size and then they put it in a product and then there's a product level testing that takes a few more months. But if they want us to change the size, it will take us multiple months to come up with a different size, like when I say size dimensions, X, Y,
Ryan Benton
And drones?
Raj Talluri
And drones I think can be much shorter. Yes, sorry, go ahead.
Alek Valero
No, sorry, go ahead. Apologies.
Raj Talluri
No, I was just saying drones, very similar. But like I said, the cycle life requirements are much shorter. And the space requirement is not as bad in the sense that there's more room there, so you don't need to exactly make this exact dimension of the cell. Sometimes they stack multiple cells to get the performance. So they may be able to use the cells that we have and stack multiple of them to meet the power. So that time of making a custom cell will come down.
Alek Valero
I appreciate the detail. Super helpful. And actually, just a quick follow-up and on that same note. So you mentioned the drones, and I believe you said that's one of the products that could handle a little bit more swelling. Can you speak to other markets besides drones that are maybe similar like this where you could get a little bit more swelling? Is there any markets there that seem attractive that you may want to penetrate in the future?
Raj Talluri
Yes. I mean I would say industrial markets that have large space, for example, I don't know, think about forklifts, stuff like that, where there's a lot more room to put the batteries in and you put it inside a big pack and you can design the pack to enable some amount of room inside that, right? That -- those are the kind of markets. But if it's a small form factor like earphones or smart glasses or cameras or consumer, they're a lot less forgiving. I would say industrial and defense are probably a little bit more forgiving.
Operator
There are no further questions at this time. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Raj Talluri for closing remarks.
Transcript from February 26, 2026

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