Beam Global at LD Micro: Navigating Shifts and Expansion

On Tuesday, 21 October 2025, Beam Global (NASDAQ:BEEM) presented at the LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference, showcasing its strategic response to evolving market conditions. The company, led by CEO Desmond Wheatley, discussed its pivot from federal contracts to focus on commercial and international markets, while highlighting sustainable technology innovations and financial resilience.

Key Takeaways

• Beam Global is navigating a shift away from U.S. federal government contracts, focusing on commercial, municipal, state, and international markets.
• The company has improved gross profits despite reduced revenues and maintains a strong balance sheet with no debt.
• Global expansion includes new facilities in Chicago and Serbia, and a joint venture in the Middle East.
• Beam Global is introducing new recurring revenue models and plans to launch a drone recharging product.

Financial Results

• Gross Profit: Despite a decrease in revenues due to a shift away from federal government contracts, Beam Global has dramatically improved its gross profits.
• Balance Sheet: The company boasts a very clean balance sheet with a low number of shares outstanding and a $100 million line of credit priced at SOFR plus 300 basis points.
• Debt: Beam Global has no debt, positioning it favorably for future growth.
• EPS: The focus on Earnings Per Share (EPS) is strengthened by a lower number of shares outstanding.

Operational Updates

• Global Expansion: Beam Global has expanded its operations to include facilities in Chicago (battery manufacturing), Belgrade and Craiova in Serbia, and a joint venture in the Middle East with the Platinum Group.
• Product Performance: The long-lasting performance of products like Unit 003, operating since 2011 without degradation, underscores the company’s commitment to quality.
• Battery Manufacturing: In Chicago, the company focuses on thermal management to enhance battery energy density and lifecycle.

Future Outlook

• Recurring Revenue Models: The introduction of sponsorship models for EV charging infrastructure and offering products as a service are expected to drive future growth.
• International Growth: Beam Global anticipates significant expansion in international markets, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.
• Drone Recharging: The upcoming release of the Beam Flight product aims to capitalize on the demand for rapid deployment and liquid fuel-free infrastructure.

Q&A Highlights

• Acquisition Funding: Acquisitions are funded through equity, cash, and potentially debt, depending on negotiation and share price outlook.
• Middle East Pipeline: The current $200 million pipeline does not include potential revenue from the Beam Middle East joint venture.
• Competition: Beam Global’s competition comes from traditional contractors rather than direct product competitors.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Beam Global’s strategic initiatives and market positioning.

Full transcript - LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference:

Operator: Awesome. We are excited to introduce to you introduce to you our next presentation from Beam Global. So let’s please welcome Desmond Wheatley, who is the president, CEO, and chairman.

Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman, Beam Global: Thank you very much for that rapid introduction. They’ve asked me to speak into the microphone today, which if any of you who know me will know that’s not easy for me because I like walking around while I’m talking, I’ll just try and maintain my energy in front of this thing here Go through some of this stuff quite quickly. So just a quick who we are. Beam Global is a San Diego based sustainable technology innovation company. That means we invent, design, engineer and actually manufacture a whole suite of different products and I’m gonna go through those in a minute with to show you what they are.

We’re based in our headquarter in San Diego, but we also have facilities, a factory facility in Chicago where we make batteries. We make our own batteries here in The United States. And then as a result of our expansion into Europe in the last couple of years, we now have a factory facility in Belgrade and another in Craiovo in Serbia. Absolutely fantastic move for us. One of the best m and a deals I’ve ever done and just a super place for us to do business.

And then very excitingly, most recently we’ve just also expanded into The Middle East with the creation of Beam Middle East. Now Beam Middle East is a little bit different for us because we don’t own it a 100%. We own everything else that we do a 100%, but in the case of The Middle East, having lived and worked over there for many many years as I did back in the bad old days, I learned that you need to have a good partner in that part of the world. So we have created a joint venture with the Platinum Group. The Platinum Group, I encourage you to look them up is chaired by his royal highness Sheikh Mohammed Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nayen.

There are lots of sheikhs in that part of the world. More shakes than you can shake a stick at some Americans might say. And they come in various different shapes and sizes, but we Sheikh Mohammed is absolutely at the top of that pyramid. He is the son of the former leader of The UAE and so we’re very well positioned there. Some people think it’s a bit odd that I’m doing business in the in a petro state.

I can tell you that they have committed to spending over a trillion dollars in the next decade on sustainable infrastructure products just like ours. So it’s an absolutely fantastic place for us to be and it’s also a gateway to Africa which will certainly be one of the largest markets for products like ours in the coming years. So we’re very happy about this. In fact, I’ll be flying over back over there again in just over a week and displaying at DriftX and doing a whole bunch of other stuff over there as well. So truly a global company.

Just quickly products. We our flagship products called the EV ARC electric vehicle autonomous renewable charger. This is a rapidly deployed infrastructure solution which allows us to put other people’s EV chargers. We don’t make the chargers. That’s an appliance and a commodity.

We don’t do that. Our products allow them to operate without doing any construction or electrical work. As a result, don’t have to do any permitting, environmental impact studies or anything else like that. We never get a utility bill because although all of our are capable of connecting to the grid, none of them need to. They generate and importantly store all of their own electricity.

So they work daytime, nighttime or during periods of inclement weather as I’ll show you in a minute. And what’s most important about this is we can deploy this in under an hour. New York City is our biggest municipal customer. It takes an average of two years to put a grid tie charger in the ground there. We do it in under an hour.

It’s not hyperbole. It’s fact. And we have several thousand of these things deployed across The United States and across the world. Each of them is capable of sporting between one and six electric vehicle chargers. So we’ve deployed masses and masses of infrastructure and done it faster than anybody else.

It will produce and and store enough electricity to drive a car to the moon and back and back up to the moon again. That’s something that most people will never try to do, but it just gives you an idea of the tremendous amount of energy that these things are producing. Okay. Part of our value proposition is not just that we’re able to rapidly deploy infrastructure, but we are also a disaster preparedness asset because we generate and store electricity without relying on the centralized grid infrastructure which is of course prone to centralized failures. The lower image that you can see there is deployment of our products for the US army, our largest customer and that is take that photograph was taken during hurricane Helene.

Take a look at the palm trees up there. That’s what palm trees look like in a 140 mile an hour winds. And what you see underneath our products, the lights are still on and still working, but what you see underneath it’s seawater. That was about eight foot of storm surge there. We continue to operate during those types of events and the army told us that our products were the only things operating and generating and delivering electricity during hurricane Helen and their Florida installations there.

So it is a phenomenally robust and very well engineered product that’s able to put up just about anything that you can throw at it and we do deploy them with the emergency power panels as well. And those have been used notably during COVID and these types of events where the grid goes down, we continue to provide electricity. Now that’s sort of important at the moment because politics is not on our side in The United States Of America. Electric vehicles, renewables and all that sort of stuff definitely out of flavor with the federal government here, but our energy security products and some of the other things that we make using the same technology very much in flavor and I still have robust and excellent conversations with Department of Homeland Security as a result of that. This is a product that we’ve recently reintroduced called Beam Bike.

We sell this product either naked as we say or with a dozen electric bicycles on it and this is a product which allows us to again rapidly deploy infrastructure to support electric bicycles. Developed originally for New York City where lots and lots of people ride delivery bikes there. They buy cheap bikes with cheap batteries. They plug them in their apartments and they burn themselves and their neighbors to death while they’re charging. Tragic but true.

New York City asked us to come up with a solution from which would allow people to charge their bikes outdoors. The bikes will still of course catch on fire, but they just won’t kill anybody when they do that. So that’s why we came up with this, but it turns out there’s a very robust market for this product and you will see us deploying these things internationally with bikes and with our own app, as well as just selling the product to to people very shortly. It’s already deployed in The United States and in Europe. In fact, that picture is taken in in Europe there.

This one I’m very proud of. This is called Beamwell. We developed this product actually for NGOs in Gaza who contacted us and told us that they have no water and no electricity and no means to deliver food, water or medic medicines to people who need them. This is a combination of four highly ruggedized electric mopeds here for the delivery of the medicines and the food. We’re turning it sunlight into electricity storing it in our onboard batteries here and very importantly this is a desalination plant.

We’re able to take salt water, brackish water, or dirty water and turn it into clean drinking water. Gaza does not have a water problem. It has a salt problem surrounded by oil covered. Has the sea all down one side, but even the wells in Gaza are full of brackish water. We can take that water and turn it into clean and fresh drinking water.

And in fact, I’m very proud of this. Just yesterday, this this is a deployment with the Royal Jordanian Armed Forces. The Jordanians and the Hashemites are some of only people who can get anything into Gaza at the moment. Standing there, the look at the two glasses. The glass on the left is the water that we brought into Beamwell.

The glass on the right is the water that people can drink immediately after it’s come out of Beamwell. So this is a product that we developed largely for war zones and unhappily the world is delivering lots of those to us at the moment, but it’s also an excellent post hurricane products. Another one sort of thing that department homeland security is very interested in. When you have a hurricane you lose electricity and you often lose groundwater too because of salt water surge and all that. We can solve that problem by desalinating and it’s deployed in an hour.

It arrives in a 20 foot shipping container. One hour later you have electricity, you have mobility, and you have fresh water as well. Absolutely unique and patented product. Beam patrol. This is for law enforcement.

Lots and lots of police departments around the world are starting to use electric motorcycles because they require no maintenance, no liquid fuels and they’re quiet. So you can get up on the bad guys without them knowing you’re coming. Imagine how fun it must have been when you were robbing a bank and Harley Davidsons were coming. You knew you had fifteen minutes after you first heard them. No longer with these these chaps here.

Police departments want electric motorcycles, they do not want to be integrators. They don’t want to develop infrastructure. And so what we do is we in one hour give them the motorcycles. We have a partnership with Zero which is an American electric motorcycle company. We give them the motorcycles, the charging infrastructure and all the fuel that those motorcycles will ever consume without having to go through any construction electrical work or anything else and they can operate their fleets with zero unit cost for energy.

It’s a fantastic tool for both police and particularly for border patrol. And then finally beam scoot derivation of the same thing, but just with scooters and this is for for facilities and rentals and all sorts of things. Beam spot, same technology just a different form factor. This is a street light replacement product to enable curbside charging. In this instance, we’re using light wind up here.

Tracking solar, it’s following the sun. All of our products use our patented tracking solution to follow the sun gives us about 25% more electricity. And then the pole of the street light is full of our proprietary batteries and electronics. This allows us to put curbside charging in without doing any major civil works or electrical works or anything else because we’re replacing an existing asset with this thing. It’s also a disaster preparedness asset because it will continue to provide light and sensors and all sorts of other things even during a a grid failure.

And then finally, the third leg of our three leg stool if you like. So electrification of transportation, energy security, and then smart cities infrastructure. We are starting to add a lot of intelligence to this type of built built infrastructure. I have a lot of metal and energy deployed all over the world. Now we’re starting to add intelligence to that metal and energy which allows us to gather data and make it available to our customers whoever they may be for whatever purpose they may have.

It’s like the Facebook of built infrastructure if you like. We know where everybody is. We know if someone screams. We know if there’s a gunshot. We know if air is unhelpful and all that sort stuff.

And because we deploy without construction and without electrical work and because we continue to operate during blackouts and brownouts. We’re just able to do that far more effectively than anybody else. And then as I said, in Chicago we manufacture our own batteries. We bring some really special stuff to that mostly around thermal management, which is really important. We get a lot more energy density and we get a lot more life out of typical battery cells because of the technology that we bring to this.

And we put batteries on our own products. Certainly, we’re a big consumer of our batteries, but we also put them in all these other things that you can see here. And that’s a very exciting place to be because the world is not just electrifying, but it’s moving to being an untethered electrified world too. Where we’re not plugging into the grid anymore. Everything that you own now is battery powered.

We’re in the business of providing those batteries. Lots of patents and IP production, barriers to entry for our competition. That’s chiefly the reason that we do this. In fact, just put out some good press releases recently about some of the new technology that we’ve introduced in the battery space, is very well received by the street. Sometimes people say to us, oh you’re a San Diego headquarter company.

No wonder you make a solar powered electric vehicle charging station. Well, here’s our deployments across The United States. Thousands of these things deployed and lots of them in places like New York City. Where during the winter, the product doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it does in San Diego in the summer, but it works well enough. We can still charge five police vehicles in in New York City every day in the winter from our product because we concentrate on daily range replenishment, not empty full empty full.

Nobody with an EV does that. We just put back the miles that they use each shift with the product and even in the winter we’re able to do that. So very robust. This is an industry where perfect is the enemy of good. We’re not interested in perfect.

We’re interested in completing the mission for our customers and our products to do that in a really interesting way. Okay. What happened here is the right question for an investor to ask and the simple thing is an election. The truth of the matter is up till this point fifty, sixty, sometimes 70% of our revenues are coming from federal government customers. I can tell you that today none of them are.

The administration is not keen on electric vehicles. The administration is not keen on renewables. I think that they’re wrong and I think that they’re wasting four years of American leadership, but that’s politics not what you’re here to listen to. The simple fact that matters we have had to re respond having built a machine that could get this type of growth and get that much product out of the doors. We’ve had to respond to that and we’re doing so.

Our growth in commercial sales, our growth in municipal and state sales is replacing everything that we lost with federal and the international growth that we have now will far outstrip it moving into the future in my opinion. And then The US will come back as soon as these silly ideas about electric vehicles are behind us and it will come back with greater urgency and frankly urgency is good for our business. While our revenues were dropping down, look what look what happened to our gross profit. That shows the discipline at the company even with less product running through. So a greater impact from overhead allocations.

We are still dramatically improving our gross profits and you will see us continue to do that. That that work will never end as far as I’m concerned. We have great products, great demand for the products and increasingly very good gross as well. And that makes our reliance on anything other than the cash that we have in the bank almost non existent, is a great place to be. A couple of other good metrics here, no going concern obviously that just sort of covered that improving gross profitability.

Take a look at our balance sheet and our cap table. Very, very clean, very low number of shares outstanding. I’ve tremendous discipline where cash and equity is concerned and that’s reflected in these numbers here. No debt, a $100,000,000 line of credit priced at three, so for plus 300 basis points and a number of shares outstanding which is less than a tenth of our nearest sort of peers in the industry. Why does that matter?

EPS folks, remember that? That used to be an important metric. Well I think it comes back to being an important metrics in the future. We have far fewer s into which to divide our e than anybody else does out does out there. So that just makes us a great value from a point of view of EPS.

Made a couple acquisitions over the last couple years. Bought a battery company in 2022. This was a spin out of CIT and that’s the battery company I was already talking to you about. And then I grew us into Europe through the two acquisitions in Serbia, which as I’ve already said were fantastic for us. And then well that’s both of them that you can see there.

We do put a fair amount of media coverage, but we don’t put out fluff. We’re publicly traded. It’s important that we get our story out to people and so we’re working hard to do that, but you won’t see us releasing anything other than new patents and that sort of thing. Just this is just kind of good. Back to the sort of military applications of this particular particularly in this country.

You know, although the federal government’s not buying from us anymore, I can tell you that our customers, the Marine Corps and the Army, the Pentagon, Space Force, All of them love the product because it served them really well. This is an instance of where we’re powering a future war fighting exercise with the US Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton just up the road from here. In this instance, everything in this exercise was electric. No liquid fuels allowed at the front. So you’re talking about robots, drones, vehicles and all sorts of other stuff.

We powered all of it. We deployed in in environments out in the middle of nowhere, less than an hour deployed. Our products have no heat signature. So they make no noise and they don’t require any maintenance or liquid fuels or anything like that. So just from a target ability point of view, they’re very powerful.

And you are going to see us releasing our drone recharging product beam flight, which is a patented product that we’ve had for for a couple years. You’re gonna see us using that type of technology for the same reasons. No liquid fuels, rapidly deployed, highly scalable infrastructure. By the way, we’re also very proud of the fact that we hire a lot of veterans. Our our San Diego facility is just about two miles away from MCAS Miramar, Morinco Air Station Miramar.

They take the uniforms over off there and they come and they work for us in our facility. We’re we’re we’re bloody proud to have them honestly. And just something else. Some of you may have gathered that I’m not from Idaho, just listening to me talking. As it happens, the British Army is also a customer of ours.

We’re deployed in Cyprus there, but I didn’t introduce them to the company. In fact, the US Marine Corps did. US Marine Corps brought British Army to us. They do a lot of technology sharing, brought them to us and as a result we’re now deploying in British overseas bases, which are not as numerous as American ones, but there’s still a few of them left. Here’s a smattering of our customers.

We don’t give anything away and that’s really important to know. We don’t really, we do offer some discounts for very large orders, but they’re one or two percentage points. So when you’re looking at these customers don’t think, well we did something special to get them. Nothing but the quality of the product sold these deals. It wasn’t my charm and we have a great sales team and an expanding sales team, but it even wasn’t frankly wasn’t that.

The simple fact that matters we have no competition at the product level. We do compete with an ecosystem of contractors and electrical workers and also for other people that put grid tied stuff in. But there’s no directly competing product. Although there are some people copying it in other parts of the world. I bet you can guess where.

But no no directly competing stuff. New York City, fact, when we closed the New York City deal back in 2015, New York told me you should give us your product and I said, now why would I do that? And they said, well because we’re the biggest brand in the world and if you win us, know, you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. And I said, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you find a competing product, I’ll look at pricing with you.

Otherwise, you pay full retail. They’ve been paying full retail ever since. We’re delighted to have them as an excellent as an excellent customer. I won’t bore you with the leadership team except to say that they’re all very well qualified and delighted to have them all very talented people. This is our European leadership team and also fantastic.

You know, I made the acquisition in Serbia, just give you a couple of pointers on that. The economics in my facilities in Serbia, which are five times larger than my than my facilities in United States. I can manufacture my product in Serbia and ship it to San Diego cheaper than I can manufacture in San Diego and ship it to San Diego. Just It gives you an indication of what the economics are like over there and why we’re expanding so dramatically there. Beyond that, when I made that acquisition, I picked up 35 advanced degree engineers who speak English better than I do and I’m paying them less than I’m paying welders in San Diego.

So that such as operating a global company. I’m a fan of globalism. It’s pretty good actually. It’s done the world really well. And then the board.

There’s me and two Americans and then a Greek giving us a footprint in in Europe as well. And there you go. With one minute and thirty four seconds before my time is up, I’m available to you for questions if you have any. Yes, sir. Yes.

So the question is how do I fund the acquisitions? The first thing I will tell you is that nobody who’s ever done an m and a deal with me would accuse me of being easy to get along with. Having said that, I do craft what I think are very good deals and I encourage you to take a look at them, look them up. But the answer to your question is, it’s a combination. Sometimes we use all equity.

Sometimes a combination of equity and cash and I’m not adverse to doing all debt or either at the moment and that’s particularly true because our stock price has taken a beating as many others have in our space. So, I know that some people tend to separate equity and cash and view them differently. I don’t. That’s why I only have such a small number of shares outstanding. I’m pretty careful with both.

I view them the same way. So some of it comes down to negotiation and then some of it just comes down to where I feel the the share price is. For example, if I’m very confident that we’re gonna, the share price is gonna appreciate well next year because of certain things that I know are coming down the pipe, I’m likely to do a debt based deal and then take out the deal with equity better priced in the future. Yes, sir.

Unidentified speaker: Your business model, how you’re generating revenue?

Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman, Beam Global: Yes. Can

Unidentified speaker: you explain that? And is it recurring revenue?

Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman, Beam Global: Yes. So the almost all the revenues that we have generated to date have been simple capital purchase on the part of our of our customers. So you’re looking at, we sell a product, we get paid and we always get paid. We have no bad debt. Having said that, we’re now introducing new recurring revenue models.

We have a sponsorship model now where we will deploy our EV charging infrastructure, stays on our balance sheet and we we give the charging away for free. It’s fantastic. You drive on sunshine for free. We don’t pay any rent in the location that we are because of the amenity value that we deliver there. So we just have that piece of that capital lump to take down and then we the way we do that is with sponsorship.

We allow others, large corporations to come and put their branding on it and to name the driving on sunshine network brought to you by your friends at. And it turns out that that makes a lot of sense for them. It’s cheaper than a billboard and a lot more popular and it makes a great deal of sense for us too. It’s very, very profitable for us. So that’s a great new recurring revenue business stream that you’ll see.

You will also see us increasingly starting to offer our products as a service or as a financed product. The service part I like it the best of course for some of them because we can offer energy, disaster preparedness, charting and all sorts of other things in a single bundle. We’re single invoice, single throat to choke if you like, which where they would normally need to gather together a lot of different vendors to solve that problem. And then other products that we have like beam bike for example, you will see us start to retain some of that infrastructure as well and in certain locations, you you’re not going to see me trying to compete with line bike and all that sort of stuff, but I have some very good locations globally where we’ll be the only show in town and from that you’ll see us taking revenue as well and the forecast looking at data in the market tells us that that will be much more profitable than selling the product as well. Thank you for asking that question.

Outside my office in San Diego, I have Unit 003. I also have 007. No prizes for guessing why I kept that one. But 003, I built and deployed that product in 2011 and at the time I thought five years gonna have to go in there and do some major stuff batteries and everything like that. Unit zero zero three has been beaten up badly because we moved around a lot.

We used it as a demo and we rented it to Fiat for a while and all sorts of stuff like that. Unit zero zero three has been operating now for almost fifteen years. No appreciable degradation to its performance. It’s still generating and storing electricity the way it did back in ’20 the early part, the 2011 when we first deployed it, which is fantastic. And part of the reason for that by the way is because we don’t save money on our bomb.

We buy the highest quality materials that we can buy. We buy the highest quality solar models. The highest quality German gears for our tracking. Anything that we don’t make in house and we make most of it in house, but anything that we don’t make in house, we buy the most expensive stuff that we can. Well that’s negatively impactful on your gross when you deploy but it adds positive impact to your gross when you don’t have warranty costs and particularly if you sell long term service plan, which we do as well.

We we charge the service plan and then we we hope we’re like the Maytag repairman. We we just never show up. Right? So then that goes straight to the bottom line. It’s a good discipline.

One that I learned early in life. Don’t save money on the bomb. Make it on warranty and and service costs and reputation. Yes, Brian.

Unidentified speaker: Being Middle East, is that a fifty fifty joint venture?

Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman, Beam Global: Yes. Is. Yes. So I’m thank you for asking that question. So BEAM Middle East with the Platinum Group is a fifty fifty joint venture.

Why am I proud of that? Because they’ve never done it before. Normally they do seventy thirty with they get the 70. The operating company that comes in gets the 30. And they have done one or two sixty forties, but they have never before done a fifty fifty.

And as I said, I’m not the easiest guy I get along with when I do these types of deals, but the result of that is if you hang in there long enough and if you have a good enough quality product that they want badly enough, you get what you want.

Unidentified speaker: And with regard to that then, is their pipeline included in your you said you have $200,000,000 pipeline. Is any of that coming from that joint venture now?

Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman, Beam Global: Nothing in the $200,000,000 pipeline I showed you on that slide is coming from The Middle East. Everything in The Middle East is upside. I would be a fool if I told you that I knew what that was going to be and even a bigger fool if I told you when I, if I knew when when that was going to be. Right? But I am very confident of this.

I’ve I have spent a lot of years over there. I know what they like. I know what they want. I know what they need and we produce it. Slow.

You obviously don’t know me very well. Jesus. Okay. Yes sir. I think we got time for one more.

Yes. Look everybody has competitors. Right? But I don’t have any direct product competition. There isn’t a direct knock off of ours.

They’re knocking off our product in China just in terms of full disclosure. Right? And they even the language off our website and everything. It’s charming in a way. And one feels like one’s arrived when that happens.

Right? But we have no direct product competition. So what are we competing with? We’re competing with that ecosystem of general contractors, electrical contractors, and other service providers who frankly most of our customers would rather get their teeth cleaned than engaged. We know there’s anything wrong with those people.

It’s just that nobody wants to walk contractors through their parking lots and dig trenches and do all that stuff. We save them all of that. We don’t have to do any of that. And I got to stop on that. Okay.

Thank you all very much.

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