Energy Focus Facility to Remain Operational During Ohio’s “Stay at Home” Order

SOLON, Ohio, March 23, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Energy Focus, Inc. (NASDAQ: EFOI), with its headquarters and a production facility in Solon, Ohio, has received letters from multiple U.S. Navy shipbuilders as well as a memorandum from the Under Secretary of Defense, Subject: Defense Industrial Base Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce, defining parameters that qualify Energy Focus as part of the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce and requiring the company to continue operations.

Energy Focus is considered part of the Defense Industrial Base, which is among the Critical Manufacturing Industries that fall within the broader Critical Infrastructure Industries, specified in the memorandum announced by U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) dated March 19, 2020.    

James Tu, Chairman and CEO of Energy Focus, stated: “We are in receipt of letters dated March 20, 2020 from multiple shipbuilder customers as well as the Under Secretary of Defense that recognize government and military suppliers such as Energy Focus during the COVID-19 pandemic as critical infrastructure companies. While the State of Ohio had issued its “stay at home” order that only permits essential businesses to stay open after March 23, 2020, our plant will continue to manufacture and fulfill our contracts and orders, while following the Company’s COVID-19 Contingency Plan (CCP) as well as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Interim Guidance for COVID-19 to ensure the safety and health of our employees.”

About Energy Focus

Energy Focus is an industry-leading innovator of sustainable LED lighting technologies and solutions. As the creator of the first flicker-free original LED products on the U.S. market, Energy Focus products provide extensive energy and maintenance savings, and aesthetics, safety, health and sustainability benefits over conventional lighting. Our customers include U.S. and foreign navies, U.S. federal, state and local governments, healthcare and educational institutions, as well as Fortune 500 companies. Since 2007, Energy Focus has installed approximately 650,000 lighting products across US Navy fleet, including TLEDs, waterline security lights, explosion-proof globes and berth lights, saving more than four million gallons of fuel and 200,000 man-hours in lighting maintenance annually. Energy Focus is headquartered in Solon, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at 

Forward Looking Statements:

Forward-looking statements in this release are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Generally, these statements can be identified by the use of words such as “believes,” “estimates,” “anticipates,” “expects,” “seeks,” “projects,” “intends,” “plans,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “would” and similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. These forward-looking statements include all matters that are not historical facts and include statements regarding our current expectations concerning and, among other things, statements regarding the timing of when we will deliver on our contract with DLA and the amounts we ultimately will receive from the contract. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. Although we base these forward-looking statements on assumptions that we believe are reasonable when made, we caution you that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and that our actual results of operations, financial condition and liquidity, and industry developments may differ materially from statements made in or suggested by the forward-looking statements contained in this release. We believe that important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to: market conditions, our need for additional financing in the near term to continue our operations; our liquidity and refinancing demands; our ability to obtain refinancing or extend maturing debt; our ability to continue as a going concern for a reasonable period of time; our ability to implement plans to increase sales and control expenses; our reliance on a limited number of customers for a significant portion of our revenue, and our ability to maintain or grow such sales levels; our ability to increase demand in our targeted markets and to manage sales cycles that are difficult to predict and may span several quarters; the timing of large customer orders, significant expenses and fluctuations between demand and capacity as we invest in growth opportunities; our ability to compete effectively against companies with lower cost structures or greater resources, or more rapid development efforts, and new competitors in our target markets; our ability to successfully scale our network of sales representatives, agents, and distributors to match the sales reach of larger, established competitors; market acceptance of our high-quality LED lighting technologies and products; our ability to remediate our material weakness and otherwise comply with our obligations as a public company and under Nasdaq listing standards; our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, and to do so in a timely manner; the impact of any type of legal inquiry, claim, or dispute; general economic conditions in the United States and in other markets in which we operate or secure products; our dependence on military customers and on the levels and timing of government funding available to such customers, as well as the funding resources of our other customers in the public sector and commercial markets; our reliance on a limited number of third-party suppliers, our ability to obtain critical components and finished products from such suppliers on acceptable terms, and the impact of our fluctuating demand on the stability of such suppliers; our ability to timely and efficiently transport products from our third-party suppliers to our facility by ocean marine channels; our ability to respond to new lighting technologies and market trends, and fulfill our warranty obligations with safe and reliable products; any delays we may encounter in making new products available or fulfilling customer specifications; any flaws or defects in our products or in the manner in which they are used or installed; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights and other confidential information, and manage infringement claims by others; our compliance with government contracting laws and regulations, through both direct and indirect sale channels, as well as other laws, such as those relating to the environment and health and safety; and risks inherent in international markets, such as economic and political uncertainty, changing regulatory and tax requirements and currency fluctuations, including tariffs and other potential barriers to international trade.

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