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05 Mar 2025
Full-year figures from the US laser company include 20% jump in sales to aerospace and defense applications.
nLight, the US-based maker of high-power semiconductor and fiber lasers, has reported sales of $199 million for 2024, down 5 per cent on the figure for 2023.
The drop in revenues saw nLight's pre-tax loss for the full year widen to $60.9 million, up from $42.6 million a year ago.
However, the company’s aerospace and defense division saw its revenues rise by 20 per cent over the same period, indicating nLight’s ongoing shift towards applications including laser weapons.
That shift was even more stark in the closing quarter of last year, with 64 per cent of the firm’s $47 million revenues attributed to aerospace and defense - the highest proportion ever reported by nLight.
Describing 2024 as a “transformative” year as the defense business began to scale, CEO Scott Keeney said: “We made significant progress across multiple large directed energy contracts, while securing new program wins in laser sensing.
“I am optimistic [about] our business, particularly aerospace and defense, as we head into 2025. We enter the year with good visibility across multiple programs in both directed energy and laser sensing, and combined with record backlog and a healthy balance sheet, we are confident that we are well-positioned for near- and long-term growth in the aerospace and defense market.”
Megawatt laser progress
Discussing the latest developments during an investor conference call, Keeney added: “nLight has led the world in the development of high-powered lasers for direct energy for over two decades and recently demonstrated a 300 kilowatt high-brightness laser.
“nLight lasers are built in the US incorporating patented and proprietary technologies across the company's entire technology stack, from semiconductor lasers to high-power fiber amplifiers, beam-combined lasers, and beam directors.
“We have generated revenue at nearly every level of vertical integration in the directed energy market, and we have established ourselves as the most comprehensive supplier to the US government, other prime contractors, and foreign allies.”
One major research effort right now is the $171 million High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI) follow-up project to build a megawatt laser - the kind of power output thought to be required to take down ballistic missiles and hypersonic projectiles - by 2026.
“We are making significant progress on our HELSI 2 program,” Keeney said. “We began shipping components to this program in the second half of 2024 and we expect to accelerate those shipments throughout 2025.”
Iron Dome
Another major focus involves the development of a 50 kilowatt high-energy laser for short-range air defense (SHORAD), a project backed by the US Army.
“During the second half of 2024 we finalized the design and delivered the majority of the most critical hardware components of this beam-combined laser,” Keeney said, adding that plans for an “Iron Dome” air defense system across the US would likely benefit the company.
“The funding numbers we have seen are very big, and there is a broad range of different approaches that are being considered,” he told investors. “We're actively engaged with a number of them right now.”
“With a mandate to build these systems in the US, we believe we are uniquely positioned to benefit from this effort over the coming years,” Keeney said, adding that he expected nLight’s aerospace and defense division to grow revenues by at least 25 per cent this year.
Turning to the industrial and commercial side of nLight’s business, the CEO said that competition from China and weak overall demand saw divisional sales slump 25 per cent year-on-year, with those headwinds expected to persist this year.
However, Keeney stressed that the experience nLight has gained in the commercial laser realm had given it an advantage over rival suppliers in the defense sector.
“It's the commercial application of these lasers that have enabled us to bring key learnings into our defense work, ensuring that our lasers are not only the highest performing but also the most cost-effective,” he said.
“Many of the competitors we see today in our defense markets are defense contractors, not laser manufacturers,” he said. “We believe that it is the application of our technology at scale with thousands of high-power laser systems shipped to customers that truly differentiates our high-energy lasers for defense.”
Additive traction
One area that does look positive for both commercial and defense applications is metal additive manufacturing, where Keeney highlighted nLight’s “Corona AFX” laser and its dynamic beam-shaping technology.
It provides a combination of high-resolution printing for finely detailed features while also offering faster build rates thanks to its stable ring-mode power, the CEO said.
Shortly after the results announcement Sintavia, a component manufacturer supplying the aerospace and defense industry that specializes in additive manufacturing, said that it had commissioned the first multi-laser industrial 3D printer in North America equipped with nLight’s AFX beam-shaping fiber lasers.
Featuring twin state-of-the-art 1.2 kilowatt lasers, the industrial 3D printer will be able to modulate beam spot size and shape without any loss of power and material density, resulting in builds that are more productive and less wasteful.
Sintavia’s founder and CEO Brian Neff said: “Over the coming years as we develop and apply this new technology, we expect to be able to print our components at layer thicknesses of 150 microns or more without losing any material properties, thus greatly increasing the output of our installed printers.
“The best part of the nLight system, once it is fully tested, is that it can be retrofitted on other existing EOS and AMCM printers with minimal new equipment.”
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