Earnings This Week Shorts about to burn. Military DronesLet's hope we get an update on Ukraine or military orders. Looking for a jump in numbers, but understand that might be next quarter. I pulled some key info out of the last earnings transcript and posted it below. Over 2 million shorts plus who knows how many naked shorts in serious trouble IMO. Price crash in February will be erased soon enough IMO.
And in fact, we’ve really had to temper that simply because of the amount of orders that we’re now preparing to fulfill and the resources that we have at hand in order to do both that work and the work that we’ve got in terms of all the training and testing that’s happening. So interesting and positive challenge to have. But nonetheless, we can’t, for technical reasons, call it backlog as of the moment, but we can call it qualified pipeline and customer demonstration, so we’re at record numbers there As everyone knows, I think the drone industry is growing, but the military impact has really been absolutely incredible since the – I think, really, all nations or all defense departments, but in particular, NATO departments are really focusing on the small UAV market.
Right now, it would probably be based on the numbers that we just went through here, probably be about 85% commercial and 15% defense as just kind of like a very, very broad rule.
However, you can expect – and I have to qualify this by saying, in my opinion, that in the coming – this year, you’ll – basically, you’ll end up seeing this being 99% defense then – and maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but let’s call it 90% defense and the rest, commercial. And by way of example, one order that comes out of the customer base that we’re working with right now in the defense market, it would be multiple times the size of our revenue for the past number of years, so it would just absolutely dwarf the commercial numbers. And that’s where we’ve been putting our focus because that’s where the big win is for the shareholders.
we’ve been focusing on getting the certifications and meeting the demand requirements on the military side. So while it seems skewed right now on the commercial side, the reality is it’s incredibly skewed on the military side. So hopefully, that provides some clarity to that question. The second question that I’ve got here is you mentioned that you have all this demand and an increased capacity, yet we haven’t seen the new contracts and why? And so we’ve got the new plant built. We’re going through the, I’ll call it, the program of record certifications. All the rest of the clearances, everything that has to happen in order for the orders to start flowing. And there is very big moats around these orders. There’s an incredible amount of testing. There’s – it’s been 1.5 years, almost two years of really intense work with multiple areas of DoD in order to put these products through.
fourth question. There’s been nothing mentioned about Ukraine lately. Is that not the focus anymore? No, the Ukraine has been incredibly important to us. It continues to be very important to us. We’re more quiet about it than we have been for many important reasons. But it’s a focus and we’re big supporters of it. And it’s been an incredibly poignant time for us to be able to look at our experience in Ukraine and relate it back to the experience that we’re bringing to our products and to the CONOPS of the domestic militaries that we’re working with right now. So Ukraine will continue to be a focus for us. And at the appropriate time, you’ll hear a lot more about the work that we’re doing there. It’s just not appropriate, at this time, for us to talk. You’ll notice overall that our PR has dropped off quite a bit, and that’s just the requirement of where we’re at right now with the number of things and the customers that we’re working with. So the fifth question is, are stocks at an all-time low. What’s the plan to turn that around? Sales. Sales, Tier 1 customers. And at the time that we can be a bit more vocal, we will be very vocal. And just because we’re really proud of the work that our people are doing and the trust that the shareholders have given us and I think I’ve been fortunate enough to be in the game long enough to know when that swing is going to happen.
And this feels like it’s going to be a really, really significant swing when it happens. We’ll be appropriately loud when we can be at that point, and it will be very meaningful. And we’ll have some great numbers to back that up as well.