Forward Industries (NASDAQ:FWDI) reported second-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s second-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://event.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1758583&tp_key=d71c673e5f
Summary
Forward Industries reported a significant improvement in revenue for Q2 2026, increasing over fourfold to $13 million, primarily due to staking revenue from their Solana treasury strategy.
The company executed strategic initiatives including a 7.4% reduction in outstanding shares through a share repurchase program and accessed $40 million in institutional debt at favorable terms to strengthen its balance sheet.
Forward Industries is focused on deepening its engagement with the Solana ecosystem, exemplified by its minority investment in the Solana native reinsurance protocol, Onre, which is part of its strategy to diversify revenue sources and enhance Sol per share growth.
The company achieved a 44% annualized Sol per share growth, largely driven by share repurchases, and is maintaining a robust balance sheet with a NAV of 0.827 as of March 31, 2026.
Management highlighted the strategic importance of Solana as a settlement layer for digital assets and emphasized their intent to position Forward Industries as the ‘Berkshire Hathaway of Solana.’
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for participating in today’s conference call to discuss Forward Industries financial and operating Results for the second quarter fiscal 2026 ended March 31, 2026. By now, everyone should have access to the second quarter of fiscal 2026 earnings press release, which was issued today at approximately 4:05 PM Eastern Time. The release will be available on the Investor Relations section of Forward Industries website. This call will also be available for webcast replay on the company’s website. Following Management’s remarks, we’ll open up the call for Q and A. I’ll now hand the call over to Forward Industries General Counsel Georgia Quinn for introductory comments. Georgia, please go ahead.
Georgia Quinn (General Counsel)
Thank you operator before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that today’s call may include forward looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities law forward looking statements made by the Board or Management on this call are based on their assumptions and beliefs. As of today, you should not rely on forward looking statements as predictions of future events as these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. For more information about these risks, uncertainties and other factors can be found in Forward Industry filings with the securities and Exchange Commission. During today’s discussion, we will reference certain metrics related to our Solana digital asset treasury, including SOL holdings, SOL per share staking, performance validator operations and deployments. These metrics are core to evaluating the execution and progress of our strategy. With that, I will turn the call over to Forward Industries Chairman of the Board Kyle Samani. Kyle, please go ahead.
Kyle Samani (Chairman of the Board)
Thank you Georgia and good afternoon everyone. Our second fiscal quarter was defined by disciplined execution. Against the backdrop of continued market volatility, we took decisive steps to strengthen Forward’s capital foundation, improve our cost structure and deepen our engagement across the Solana ecosystem. In March, we completed a strategic share repurchase that reduced our common shares outstanding by 7.4%, accessing $40 million of institutional debt from Galaxy Digital on highly advantageous terms and implemented a cost reduction initiative that has yielded material operating expense savings through disciplined cost management. Together, these actions reflect the long term mindset that we bring to managing Forward disciplined capital allocation, compounding SOL per share which is currently above 44% on an annualized basis, on an annualized in the money basis, and positioning the business to grow and diversify alongside the Solana ecosystem. These two themes our continued conviction in the Solana ecosystem, particularly its accelerating momentum across stablecoins payments and real world assets, and the opportunities we see to deepen forward engagement with the Solan ecosystem to grow and diversify our revenue are where I want to focus our time today, starting with the network Solana’s transition from promising technology to real financial infrastructure has accelerated meaningfully in recent months for stablecoins and payments. Solana is emerging as the default settlement layer for dollar denominated value on chain. According to Masari report published in early March, total payment volume on Solana grew more than 8x year over year, which is nearly three times the median growth rate of comparable fintech and blockchain platforms. The Solana Foundation’s launch of payments.org in late February and the Solana developer platform in March, which brings together mastercard, worldpay, Western Union and other global payments partners, has consolidated what had been a fragmented set of partnerships into a single institutional grade payment stack. Western Union is expected to go live with its US Dollar payment token USDPT on Solana in the first half of this year, connecting on chain dollar transfers to Western Union’s network of more than 360,000 physical cash locations worldwide on real world assets. In January, Ondo Finance launched over 200 tokenized US stocks and ETFs on Solana, joining an ecosystem where tokenized equities had already processed over 3 billion in transaction volume. Forward was among the first pilot companies to put its SEC registered shares on chain through Superstate, and we view the rapid expansion of tokenized equities on Solana as further validation of the thesis that Solana is becoming the settlement layer for capital markets. In March, The SEC approved NASDAQ’s proposal to trade tokenized securities alongside their traditional counterparts on the same order book covering Russell 1000 stocks and major ETFs. As a Nasdaq listed company that already has its shares tokenized on Solana, we view this as a powerful convergence. The infrastructure that Forward helped pioneer is now being adopted by the exchanges themselves. On the infrastructure side, the rollout of Firedancer Jump, Crypto’s independent validator client for Solana, represents a landmark moment for the network’s decentralization and resilience. Firedancer’s testnet results showed throughput exceeding 1 million transactions per second, and the client is now phased and now phased mainnet deployment. This is exactly the kind of foundational infrastructure maturation that institutional participants need to see before committing capital at scale. At the network level, Solana continues to lead across the metrics that matter decentralized exchange volume, real economic value generated, active users, and developer engagement. These fundamentals reinforce our view that it is not just another blockchain. It is the execution layer for what we’ve often called the Internet capital markets. Before we move on to forward strategic initiatives, I want to address a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. The security incidents developing Drift Protocol on Solana and more broadly, the other exploits we’ve seen as a crypto industry across a number of other networks. The key point here is that the incident involving Drift was a social engineering attack, not an explicit exploit of the Solana protocol or contract code itself. Bad actors targeted with privilege access through deception, not through any underlying vulnerability in the network. To be clear, Solana’s Core Layer 1 network has not experienced a consensus level breach. The base protocol has continued to operate with full uptime, strong validator decentralization, and no cryptographic vulnerabilities. Think of it this way, a brief at a company running on AWS does not mean AWS is broken. The same logic applies here. If anything, these incidents reinforce how seriously we take operational security in managing our own holdings. As the Solana ecosystem continues to accelerate, so do the opportunities for Forward to leverage protocols in the network to drive revenue growth. As Such, priorities for 2026 are focused on two initiatives. First, deepening our engagement with the FLAN ecosystem in ways that grow and diversify our revenue, and second, using our strengthened balance sheet to lower cost structure and accelerate SOL per share growth. On the ecosystem engagement front, we’ve made meaningful progress on initiatives we’ve discussed previously. First, Tokenized FWDI Forward remains one of the only public companies with SEC registered shares that live on a public blockchain through Superstate’s opening DAO platform. There are currently more than 6.9 million shares at FWDI tokenized on Solana and the Camino Pool where FWDI can be utilized as collateral for on chain loans is approximately 91% utilization. Next initiative I’d like to talk about is our Forward validator and FWDsold. Today over 6.9 million SOL is staked to forwards validator and it is the 8th largest validator in the Solana network by stake weight. Our proprietary liquid staking token SWD Sol has become a cornerstone of our capital market strategy. It is collateral supporting our 40 million institutional debt facility with Galaxy, which Ryan will discuss more in detail. On the revenue front, I want to highlight Forward Industries minority investment in deployment of capital in onri, a Solana native reinsurance protocol that is building infrastructure to bring traditional risk transfer markets on chain. Since launch, ONRE has attracted meaningful liquidity onboarded its first reinsurance counterparties and built a real reputation as one of the more interesting DEFI native risk protocols on Solana. What’s compelling here is that Forward participates in ONRI both as an investor and as a participant in the ONRE protocol by purchasing ONYC tokens so we have direct upside as the protocol grows and generates fee revenue that also adds USD denominated non correlated revenue for Forward, which helps diversify our revenue base beyond sol. Each of these initiatives is designed to accomplish the same thing turn Forward from a passive treasury holder into an active participant in the Solani economy, generating yields above the native staking rate, expanding our surface area on chain, and creating durable sources of revenue beyond staking alone. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Ryan Navi, Ford’s Chief Investment Officer, to further discuss our strategic initiatives and treasury performance during the quarter.
Ryan Navi (Chief Investment Officer)
thank you Kyle and good afternoon everyone. Since stepping into the CIO role in December, I focused on building out a comprehensive plan to drive meaningful SOL per share growth, lower our cost of capital and position Ford as the Berkshire Hathaway of Solana in the long term. Today, I’d like to walk through our progress on all three, starting with treasury performance, moving through our capital structure actions during the quarter, and closing with how we’re positioning Ford for the Future. As of March 31, 2026, Ford held a little over 7 million Solana, with nearly all of our holdings generating native staking yield between 6.5 and 7.2%. Cumulative staking rewards since our inception in September 2025 have now exceeded 200,000 Solana 25.1% of our Solana is now represented as SWD SOL, our proprietary liquid staking token developed with Sanctum SWD Sol is what allows us to continue earning native staking yield while simultaneously using our holdings productively as collateral, and it is the foundation of the institutional debt facility. I’ll discuss in more detail later. Turning to SOL per share, we continue to compound our fully diluted SOL per share from 0.0604 in September 2025 to 0.0624 as of December 31, 2025 and to 0.0669 as of March 31, 2026. That reflects annualized sold per share growth of 29.1% on a fully diluted basis. Since the launch of our treasury strategy. On an in the money share basis, our annualized sold per share growth exceeds 44%. Our fully diluted share count as of March 31, 2026 was 105,231,015 shares comprised of 76,314,617 common shares net of treasury 25,759,600 warrants 1,599,066 options and 1,557,732 unvested restricted and performance stock units. The reduction in common shares outstanding from 84.9 million to 76.3 million reflects our March repurchase of 6.2 million shares in our ongoing share repurchase program which reduced our basic shares outstanding by 10.1%. As of March 31, 2026, Ford’s NAV was 0.827 calculated using the closing price of Solana on March 31 of $83.12, total sole holdings of 7,044,079 plus our cash balance less debt, Ford’s closing price of $4.43 and a fully diluted share count of 105,231,015 shares. The most consequential actions during the quarter were in our capital structure. In March we completed two highly strategic transactions that taken together represent the disciplined capital allocation we believe is required to deliver long term value to our shareholders. This in turn gave us the balance sheet strength to capitalize on opportunities like our investment and deployment into Henri, which provides Ford with upside as the tokenized RWA ecosystem on Solana grows and adds a USD denominated revenue stream for the company. First we entered into a master digital currency loan agreement with our long standing partner Galaxy Digital and drew on an initial 40 million facility collateralized by FWD SOL with a weighted average interest rate of 3.4% and a weighted average maturity of 5 months. I really want to underscore how compelling these terms are. At a 3.4% weighted average interest rate, this facility represents access to capital at a cost that is in our view not only highly advantageous relative to what is available to most companies in our sector, but also most publicly traded small to medium sized market cap companies. Our extremely attractive cost of capital is the direct product of the strength of both our balance sheet and our team’s approach to risk management. Given the recent drawdown in Solana. In conjunction with our shares trading at a discount to nav, we made the conscious decision to lower our cost of capital via non dilutive financing, meaning that we were able to access liquidity without issuing equity or selling our sole holdings. It is also important to Note that approximately 40% of this facility is evergreen in nature, which means it automatically renews and does not require active refinancing. This provides us with a stable recurring capital base and means the effective refinancing burden on the remaining portfolio is both manageable and well within our liquidity planning horizon. Second, on March 19th we announced the deployment of 27.4 million of that $40 million credit facility to repurchase 6.2 million shares of our common stock at $4.44 per share. This transaction reduced our basic shares outstanding by 7.4% and our fully diluted shares outstanding by 5.5% which drove an immediately compelling SOL per share accretion of 8.0% on a common share basis and 5.8% on a fully diluted basis. Third, on May 5th we announced our investment and deployment into Henri alongside Rockaway X, the global multi strat digital asset investment firm. Ford Co led Henri’s 5 million Series A at a 25 million post money valuation and has begun deploying capital into ONYC. Henri’s yield bearing token on Solana NYC provides Ford with real world cash flows that are both complementary and uncorrelated to Solana. By gaining exposure to reinsurance through a tokenized on chain structure, we’re unlocking a new layer of durable dollar denominated income while remaining fully aligned with the Solana ecosystem. Together, this series of transactions gives us three things dramatic SOL per share growth, a robust balance sheet to continue operating and investing in the business and most importantly, an enhanced capital structure that lowers our cost of capital which unlocks a wider opportunity set to pursue strategic transactions beginning with Ornery that will deliver greater SOL per share growth and value to shareholders over the course of 2020. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on driving efficiencies across the business while executing on three strategic priorities. First, continuing to leverage our advantageous access to capital through the GALSEE facility and new potential …
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