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Wahid Nawabi

Chairman of the Board, President & Chief Executive Officer, AEROVIRONMENT INC

Search every verified Wahid Nawabi interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Wahid Nawabi, chairman, president, and CEO of AeroVironment, participated in the company’s 2026 Investor Day and its fourth quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call in June and July 2026. During the Investor Day, Nawabi stated that he believes the company’s stock is “significantly undervalued relative to the market that we're in.” He also said that AeroVironment is the largest producer of military drones in the United States and that its installed base of drones globally is among the largest, with over 60,000 to 70,000 systems deployed. On the earnings call, Nawabi noted that the company’s loitering munitions business had grown from a “small low double digit” revenue business to roughly a half-billion dollar business, and he said he would not be surprised if the directed energy and counter-UAS business became “equally as large if not two to three times bigger” in the next three to five years. In a June 2026 interview with CNBC, Nawabi discussed the role of drones in modern warfare, stating that a “major paradigm shift” in the industry began with the conflict in Ukraine. He described the company’s Freedom Eagle 1 missile as a product designed to address the cost imbalance of using multi-million dollar missiles to defeat low-cost drones, with a target price point of roughly $150,000. Nawabi also addressed a goodwill impairment related to the space reporting unit, attributing it to a stop-work order on the SCAR Badger program and an error in prior calculations by a third-party accounting firm, which he said management detected and corrected. He expressed cautious optimism about future budgets, noting that it is difficult to predict when they will pass but that positive changes could benefit revenue and profitability.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“A data point Ukraine published it to us directly. We made it public in that time period of Switchblade 600 for example used about $36 million of it and they destroyed over 2.6 or 2.7 billion dollar worth of Russian assets.”

“We are the largest producer of military drones in the United States today and we've been doing that for the last two decades. The installed base of our drones globally is also probably the largest if not one of the largest in the world. We've got well over 60 70,000 of our systems deployed actively and these things have been battle tested over several several years and couple decades actually starting from the confli”

“US today we use 2 to 10 million missiles to take out a 50 to $150,000 drone that economics is not going to be sustainable and so Freedom Eagle 1 is specifically developed and designed to address that problem. It is a ground from the groundup built design product to be roughly about a $150,000 price point and it's focused on group one, two and three drones initially and eventually could actually even work against miss”

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