Beam Global Common Stock Investor update

Hey, Luke. Thank you very much for the introduction, and thank you to all of you who are tuning in today to hear this, what I think is probably one of the most important webinars that we've done in our history. I'm certainly looking forward to it, and I'm looking forward very much to sharing information with you about the company today, Beam Global today, where it is, and the evolution of the company. Then, of course, what I think everybody wants to know and understand is more about this acquisition that we have in process at the moment of ScoutDI, which is, from my point of view, absolutely the perfect next step in our evolution. I hope you'll come away from this webinar sharing that impression with me. Without further ado, I'll move here.

You can all have a quick scan through the forward-looking statements here. Let's start here just looking at Beam Global and our history, because it's interesting. We've evolved a lot since we started out back in the third quarter of 2010, making the world's first fully autonomous off-grid solar-powered electric vehicle charging station. You can imagine back then, that was a tough way to earn a living. There weren't a lot of electric vehicles on the road at the time. In fact, we went through a sort of an 8-year desert, basically, while we waited for the electric vehicle adoption rates to pick up. So really for that first sort of 8 to almost 10 years, or even more than 10 years, we were fully engaged and entirely immersed in making these off-grid electric vehicle charging stations. Fantastic product. We still sell an awful lot of them today.

I think we're going to sell a lot more of them in the future as well. So this is a space that we're still very actively involved in, and we're going to continue to be involved in that. I think electrification of transportations is absolutely a certainty. It's inevitable. I travel a lot, spend a lot of time in Europe and in Africa and in the Middle East, and the adoption of electric vehicles over there is absolutely phenomenal. In fact, Norway, where I've just been as a result of this transaction we're working on right now, something like 98% of new vehicle registrations are electric vehicles. That's going to be a global phenomenon, and I think we will see an awful lot more activity.

Certainly a little depressed in the U.S. at the moment, and that's part of the reason, only part of the reason, but it's part of the reason that we have been taking diversification steps over the last couple of years, because we want to have more opportunities to bring value to our customers and to our shareholders. in 2022, we made our first acquisition. I have to tell you, at the time I did that, I wanted to get into the battery business largely because there were supply chain worries at that time. We were worried we weren't going to get enough batteries. Of course, all of our products generate and store their own electricity, and you need batteries to do that. We were a little worried that we weren't going to be able to buy batteries to do that.

Batteries are about a third of the cost of our EV ARC™ product, for example. I wanted to make sure that we got that margin in-house. So we acquired AllCell Technologies. We'd been using the technology itself for about a decade, so we were very confident in its capabilities and its unique nature, certain of the attributes which are absolutely unique. That was a really good move for us. We were able to defend our supply chain, recapture some margin. You will have seen that improve margins at the time because we were putting our own batteries into our products. It also got us into a whole lot of other interesting spaces. AllCell has evolved since we've owned it. It's now Beam's energy storage business.

We're now putting batteries in drones, robots, medical devices, all sorts of mobility, submersibles, and even, frankly, top-secret weapons now. Furthermore, we're developing some fantastic battery technology for the AI data center revolution. There's a lot of talk about grid-scale, utility-scale batteries for data centers, but not so much talk about really energy dense, high-speed discharge, high-speed charging batteries for the extreme demands of AI and data centers. That's what we're really good at. We're in the process of developing those products now. So this is a fantastic acquisition for us. We've got some brilliant people. Saeid Al-Hallaj, he was the founder of AllCell. He's still with us, one of the world's preeminent battery scientists, and his whole team headed up by DJ Gilmore and others there, engineers, scientists, and manufacturing capabilities in Chicago, Illinois, making batteries.

That was probably the beginning of our sort of diversification of products, where we weren't just making solar-powered EV charging stations. All the way back in 2022, that started. In 2023, I executed on my aspiration to make us more of a global organization. Great thing about our products is they work anywhere they can see the sky, so there was no need to limit ourselves to the United States or North America. With that, we acquired Amiga. Wow, talk about product diversification. We immediately, amongst other things, became the fourth-largest streetlight manufacturer in Europe. That might sound kind of boring to you until you remember that streetlights are powered hardware every few meters down a street to which we can add intelligence, generation, battery storage, EV charging, and all sorts of other things.

That's the mission that we've been on wholeheartedly since that time, firmly moving us into the kind of smart cities area. You can now see this kind of three-legged stool developing where we are involved in the future of mobility. We're involved in energy storage and generation, and we're also involved in this kind of smart cities infrastructure, adding intelligence to the built environment. The other thing that Amiga brought us, 35 advanced degree engineers, a fantastic factory facility in Serbia where the economics are very good, the people are very well educated, very great work ethic there, good English qualities, speaking qualities that is. We really expanded dramatically. In fact, our capability in our facilities over there are superior to those in our U.S. facilities. We're more vertically integrated in Serbia, and the economics are much better there.

Much so, by the way, that absent tariffs, we can make our EV ARC™ product, for example, in our Serbian facilities and ship it to a customer in San Diego less expensively than we could make it in San Diego and ship it to a customer in San Diego. Just a fantastic team of people headed up by Ivan Tlačinac, who runs our Beam Europe operations now. A very talented guy, and a great operation over there, doing a whole host of things, but also capable of building all of the products that we've developed in-house and patented in-house. Those products, by the way, are comprised of our own in-house manufactured components and other people's off-the-shelf stuff.

For many years we've been buying power electronics, and prior to our AllCell acquisition, we were buying batteries from other people, but we're still buying a lot of power electronics from other people. In 2024, we acquired Telcom, which is a power electronics company. Same impact with us. We were immediately able to become more vertically integrated. In the same way that we produce bespoke batteries for our products, we're now producing bespoke electronics for our products, defending margin, improving our products' capabilities, and enabling us to have a much tighter control over that whole process. Again, Telcom brought us other products, other services, and other customers, just as the Amiga acquisition did and just as the AllCell acquisition did. You can see what's happening here. We've got this geographic expansion.

Now we're heavily in Europe, and you can see that we've got this product portfolio expansion. All the while, by the way, we're inventing new products across the company as well. We went just from being an EV charging company. Now we had electric bike products, we've got law enforcement products with motorcycles. We've got, as I say, batteries and weapons and drones and all sorts of other things. We're becoming a much more diversified and broader platform as a result of, A, the acquisitions that we're making, but also our internal and organic development of new IP. We are at heart a product development company. We're really good at creating products which are focused on the most compelling and absolutely current opportunities of the time. Those are the future of mobility, no question about that.

Energy storage and generation, also incredibly important in the era that we're living in, and then this idea of bringing intelligence to the broad built environment. We're producing all of those things now, many of them with patents, many of them with our own invented and engineered products. Absolutely current and very compelling opportunities, and we're very well equipped to go after those, both in the Americas and in Europe. In the fourth quarter of last year, I have to say my timing wasn't brilliant on this one, but in the fourth quarter of last year, we opened Beam Middle East. This is the first thing that we did which wasn't wholly owned by Beam. This is a joint venture with the Platinum Group, chaired by a member of the royal family in the UAE.

This was a fantastic move as well because it got us into the Middle Eastern market, the Gulf states that have already committed spending over $1 trillion on infrastructure, just like the products that we make. They're really into future of mobility, they're really into non-traditional sources of energy and energy storage, and they're really into technology in the built environment. In many ways, more advanced than we are here in the U.S., but a really strong appetite for products just like ours. So that's a fantastic opportunity for us, a trillion-dollar market there. And of course, a gateway to Africa. Africa's another place that has a great set of opportunities for us because at the moment, it's more or less a blank sheet of canvas where energy and transportation infrastructure is concerned.