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spk06: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blink Charging Company Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ali Blania, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.
spk13: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Blink Charging's Third Quarter 2021 Investor Call. On the call today, we have Michael Farkas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Brendan Jones, President, and Michael Rama, Chief Financial Officer. Please note that there is a slide presentation accompanying today's earnings call, whereby viewers can follow along. The slides can be accessed on the investor relations section of the Blink Charging website. I would like to take a moment to read the Safe Harbor Statement. This conference call contains forward-looking statements as defined within Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. These forward-looking statements and terms such as anticipate, expect, intend, may, will, should, or other comparable terms involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future. Those statements include statements regarding the intent, belief, or current expectations of Blink and members of its management, as well as the assumptions on which such statements are based. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, including those described in Blink's periodic reports filed with the SEC. and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Except as required by federal securities law, Blink undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect change conditions. I will now turn the call over to Michael Farkas, CEO of Blink Charging. Go ahead, Michael.
spk10: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Let me start by highlighting some of our achievements in Q3. which was a very strong quarter for Blink. As you can see, revenue grew to $6.4 million, a record for the company fueled by strong performance in both product sales and service revenues. This was a 607% increase. I'm going to repeat that. 607% compared to the same quarter last year and a 47% increase sequentially from Q2. We are making tremendous strides, increasing our network of property partners and signing exclusive multi-year contracts as we continue to gain traction in the ever-growing EV infrastructure market. In the quarter, we contracted, sold, or deployed over 3,000 commercial and residential chargers and have grown the number of commercial Blink-owned charging stations by more than 100% compared to the same quarter last year, which aligns with our strategic focus on expanding our Blink-owned charging footprint. We continue to target deployments in high density, high volume venues like municipal locations, mixed use centers, hotels, multifamily residential and healthcare facilities. This will best position us to maximize the utilization rates of our chargers as more individual drivers and fleets transition to greener transportation. Our international growth strategy remains on track, highlighted by Blue Corner's most recent contract with KU Leuven to expand our charging stations to various locations across Belgium. Throughout the quarter, the company has also been very successful, winning new grant and rebate awards from various government programs, bringing our total award to $25 million this year alone. And lastly, we continue to add the most talented people in the industry to support our expected growth with over 20 new employees added in this quarter. As we see in the next slide, the EV industry is in its early stages of massive growth for the foreseeable future, and we are well positioned at the forefront of this industry expansion. The International Energy Agency projects global EV sales to grow from 3 million vehicles in 2020 to about 25 million vehicles in 2030. a 24% KGAR growth rate in this period alone. With sales of EV transportation segments expected to grow exponentially, there will be an ever-increasing need for additional charging infrastructure. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the country reached a milestone with its 100,000th EV charging station earlier this year. Industry analysts at GuideHouse Insights forecast that we will need a total of 120 million. I'm going to repeat that, 120 million chargers globally by 2030. This industry hasn't even started. This is providing tremendous opportunity for us to greatly expand our charging footprint. A key driver of this anticipated growth has been and will continue to be the favorable legislative environment surrounding EV adoption on both a national and global scale. As I'm sure many of you are aware, just last week, US congressional lawmakers passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, of which $7.5 billion is just focused and targeted on EV charging, build-out, and infrastructure. This bill aligns with the president's aspirations to have half of the vehicles sold in the United States in 2030 to be zero emission vehicles and to have 500,000 EV charging stations in place that same year. You know, the Biden administration looks at charging stations as one looks at gas stations where you'll have many pumps or chargers at those locations. So those 500,000 charging stations actually translates into two, three million individual chargers. We believe this legislation is a game changer for our industry and will provide opportunities to significantly accelerate the development and deployment of an expansive EV charging network in the US. Looking at slide six, we believe Blink is uniquely positioned to deliver shareholder value driven by four competitive advantages. First, our products are built with the most advanced technology in the industry. We design our products with future innovation in mind, so they employ cutting edge technology and can be utilized for many years to come and not become obsolete like many competing chargers on the market today. Again, we have a different model. We own and operate our charging stations. We build our charging stations to last in the field for a very, very long time. Our competitors are driven by upgrades. and for their customers to have to put new chargers in the ground every couple of years. We build a better box because we own it and want it to be in the field for a very, very long time. Second, we offer our customers multiple deployment methodologies to choose from, providing them with the ideal solution to match their specific needs. In addition to the flexible model options for our customers, we provide best in-class products through long-term exclusive contracts with automatic extensions These agreements allow Blink to establish a market presence at our customers' locations and at charging stations at our discretion when usage increases and demand requires. We largely focus on charging stations that are Blink-owned because that enables us to benefit from and take advantage of valuable recurring revenue streams for many, many years to come. Due to the breadth and depth of our offerings, Blink is the only fully vertically integrated EV charging infrastructure company in the US today. Third, our company is laser focused on expanding our charging footprint, both domestically and internationally. We are intent on finding partner locations in high density areas that will not only meet the needs of current EV drivers, but will position us also to capitalize on the steady transition away from gas powered vehicles to EVs. Europe has more quickly adopted the shift to EVs, and our recent acquisition of Blue Corner is already extending our presence on the continent. We look forward to the continued expansion of our footprint through both organic efforts and M&A opportunities. And finally, as EV adoption accelerates throughout the world, combined with our expanding footprint of strategically placed charging stations, we believe utilization will continue to improve at a faster growth rate, leading to higher recurring service revenues in the future. Altogether, these four key advantages are what sets us apart from our competitors and provides Blink with attractive long-term economics for our stakeholders. In summary, we're excited to have achieved record revenues in Q3, and we're making great progress on many aspects of our business thanks to the tremendous efforts made by all of our dedicated employees, and our employees are what Blink's made of. It's important to remember that we are at the beginning of the EV transition. with much more to go, which is why we're strategically investing across our business to ensure we capitalize on all of the opportunities we're seeing in this amazingly booming market. 2021 has been a busy and exciting year thus far, and we look forward to finishing the year strong and carrying our momentum into 2022. Now I'll turn the call over to Brendan Jones, president of Blink, to discuss some of our recent developments. Go ahead, Brendan.
spk05: Thank you, Michael. Good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to speak with everyone today. We are seeing consistent and growing interest in our company's products and services, resulting in many new contract wins in Q3. Slide 8 shows you some of our notable U.S. wins, which include partnering with the city of San Antonio to deploy 202 Blink-owned Level 2 charging stations and three DC fast charger stations throughout the city, with the first deployment taking place a few weeks ago at the San Antonio Zoo. We are also expanding Blink mobility via our Blue LA car sharing program with the city of Los Angeles to deploy and operate 300 additional charging stations, bringing the total under the program to 500, which will be placed at 100 locations throughout Los Angeles. And we've entered into a five-year agreement with Greenlight Communities to deploy 58 Blink-owned charging stations within their multifamily residential communities across Arizona, and we are looking forward to providing them with additional charging stations as new communities are built and expanded. Now, turning to slide nine, we've entered into three new reseller agreements that allow us to access the distribution channels of our partners and increase our market reach. We entered into a supplier contract with Sourcewell a self-sustaining government organization that offers contract purchasing solutions capturing the potential buying power of over 50,000 organizations. We signed a reseller agreement with Ruby's Performance Parts, an online North Carolina-based leading automotive provider for the resale of blank chargers across their distribution channels. And we also partnered with traffic and parking control company known as TAPCO a Wisconsin-based custom traffic safety and parking solutions provider for the distribution of Blink chargers. Now, if we turn to slide 10, within the last 12 months, Blink has contracted, sold, deployed, or acquired over 12,000 chargers, both domestically and international, bringing the total charger count for the company to over 28,000 since Blink's inception. We have a healthy mix of deployments in the United States and abroad, with 63% of total Blink chargers deployed in the United States and 37% deployed internationally, predominantly in Europe through Blue Corner. In addition, as of the third quarter, Blink provides service to over 250,000 registered members and unique users throughout the world. We expect the increasing demand we are seeing for our charging stations, as well as the expansion of our footprint on a global scale to drive strong revenue growth, both near and long term for blank. Now, if we move on to slide 11, there we are aggressively deploying charging stations in key geographic locations throughout the United States and Europe. Locations are strategically determined based on several factors. including EV penetration and driving habits, population and density figures, historical and forecasted traffic patterns, and future market growth potential. This quarter, we deployed charging stations across seven U.S. states and territories, working with both local and state government agency and numerous companies. On the international front, we continue to grow our charging footprint overseas through our European subsidiary, Blue Corner. which most recently won a multi-year contract with KU Levin, one of Europe's leading research institutes to provide and operate charging stations at their campuses across Belgium. While we have broad and diverse coverage across the US, we continue to remain focused on expanding our charging footprint in various countries throughout the world. Turning now to slide 12, in the third quarter we were awarded five government grants at the local and state levels, totaling tens of millions of dollars. A case in point is the $12.5 million grant we received from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Now this award is for the deployment of 5,275 kilowatt DC fast chargers with battery and solar powered PV shade systems at 25 locations along Florida's major interstate highways. We are very excited to have won this award from our home state and are happy to see that more and more government officials are placing a higher priority on building out EV infrastructure and choosing Blink as their partner of choice. Grants and rebates provide an excellent opportunity to significantly expand our charging footprint across a larger geographic region while minimizing Blink's total cash outlay for deployments, thereby decreasing the payback period and improving the return on investment. We placed a greater emphasis on securing grants and rebates to help fund the deployment of our chargers while simultaneously assisting these agencies to promote EV adoption. To make sure we win as many of these opportunities out there, especially as the incremental funding is set aside for EV charging stations as part of the new infrastructure bill, we are expanding our in-house grant and rebate team. This will enable us to have additional resources necessary to capture increased available funds to widely deploy EV charging stations across the country. Wrapping up, we experienced significant sequential and year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2021. The consistent growth in our deployment numbers, product sales, and revenues are excellent indicators of what's ahead for both Blink Charging and the industry as a whole. we remain confident in our ability to be a leader in the global EV charging infrastructure industry. Thank you, and I will now turn it over to our CFO, Michael Rama, to run through some of the specific results for the quarter. Go ahead, Michael.
spk09: Thank you, Brendan, and good afternoon, everyone. Now, turning to slide 14, you'll see that total revenues in the third quarter of 2021 grew to $6.4 million, a record for the company, and an increase of 607% compared to the third quarter of 2020. In addition, third quarter revenues were up 47% sequentially over the second quarter, primarily driven by increasing demand for our global EV charging infrastructure and higher service revenues. Product sales in the third quarter of 2021 were $4.8 million, an increase of 766% over the same period in 2020, as customers purchased greater volumes of our commercial chargers, DC fast chargers, and residential chargers, as well as revenues generated through our Blue Corner acquisitions. Third quarter 2021 service revenues, which consists of charging service revenues, network fees, and ride-sharing revenues, were $1.4 million, an increase of 425% compared to the third quarter of 2020. This year-over-year growth was primarily driven by greater utilization of our chargers, an increased number of chargers on our Blink network, revenues associated with the Blink Mobility ride-share program and revenues from the Blue Corner acquisition. We feel combining these three service lines into the total service revenue amount makes it easier to differentiate between the product and service aspects of our business and aligns with our company's strategic goal of increasing the service component of our revenue mix and growing our recurring revenue base. In time, as EV adoption accelerates and the utilization of our charging stations improve, We anticipate seeing a larger mix of revenues come from services. Gross profit for the third quarter of 2021 was approximately $900,000, an increase of 143% over the same period in the prior year, and up 39% sequentially from Q2. Margins remain healthy, and we continue to look at ways to reduce our component costs, especially in light of the ongoing supply chain disruptions occurring globally. Now operating expenses in the third quarter of 2021 were $16.7 million compared to $4.3 million in the prior year period. The $12.4 million increase year over year was primarily due to three factors. First, as I've discussed on previous calls, we continue to make investments in hiring new talent in order to meet the ever increasing demand for our products and services. We are strengthening our sales, operations, marketing, IT, and customer service functions, as well as growing our in-house grant and rebate team, as Brendan just mentioned. So we can capitalize on many EV infrastructure opportunities that lie ahead. Second, we recognize $6.1 million in higher share-based compensation expense, mostly related to a special performance option equity award. We anticipate a similar non-cash share-based compensation amount to be recorded in the fourth quarter, with this special performance option equity award to be fully expensed by January 2022. And third, the full operating expenses from our three most recent acquisitions, Yugo, Blue LA, and Blue Corner, are included in the third quarter 2021 results, whereas these expenses were predominantly absent in the prior year's numbers. I do want to reiterate that we will continue to invest in new technology and talent across the business, but we'll ensure expenses are closely watched. This quarter, we are also introducing a new financial metric, adjusted EBITDA, going forward. Our management team believes this non-GAAP measure is useful in evaluating our company's core operating performance because it excludes items that are either significant non-cash or non-recurring expenses. As such, adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2021 was a loss of $8.4 million compared to a loss of $3.7 million in the prior year period, largely due to the higher operating expenses as I just mentioned. However, third quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA improved sequentially from Q2 as we continued to make progress towards scaling the business. Now turning to slide 15, you can see that both our revenue and gross profit have performed quite well over the last several quarters, with the trend showing an upward growth trajectory. As we drive our owner-operated strategy, combined with greater demand for EV infrastructure and increased utilization rates, we have the opportunity to dramatically improve both revenue and gross profits even further over time. Moving to our cash position, we ended the quarter with approximately 187 million dollars of cash and marketable securities compared to 22 million dollars we ended with last year we believe we have sufficient cash on hand to fund our strategic initiatives these initiatives include building innovative product and software platforms onboarding additional talent extending our market reach globally and potentially acquiring businesses that could either accelerate the company's growth or expand Blink's vertical integration within the broader EV infrastructure ecosystem. Summing up, I'm pleased with the record revenues in the third quarter and the direction many of our financial metrics are headed. We're still in the early stages of the EV evolution and still have much work to be done, but we believe Blink is well positioned to take advantage of the EV infrastructure growth the industry is poised to deliver. I will now turn the call back over to Michael Farkas with some final remarks.
spk10: I would like to end this call emphasizing that our primary focus at Blink has been and will always be on securing the best locations and extending our relationships with property partners and location managers. We've always known that there would be multiple opportunities to monetize our trophy locations that we've developed over the last 12 years, more than just EV charging services. And we're excited to announce at this time another way of monetizing our portfolio locations. We're unveiling new innovative products at CES in early January this coming year. These new products feature state of the art technology with large, high resolution screens that will allow Blink and its property partners to monetize locations immediately by generating advertising revenues. These revenues will be in addition to the charging revenues received, unlike others in our space who give away charging services, which will now create yet another valuable recurring revenue stream potential for Blink and for our stakeholders. We look forward to rolling out this new product globally in 2022, so I encourage everyone to come see our booth at CES this year. With that, we will now open the call for questions.
spk06: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you have any questions or comments, please press star 1 on your phone now. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may press star 2 to leave the queue. We do ask that if you are listening via speakerphone to please pick up your handset for optimum sound quality. Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please press star 1 now. Please hold for a moment while we poll for questions. And our first question today is coming from Matt Somerville at DA Davidson. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk02: Good afternoon. This is William Jellison on for Matt Somerville today. I wanted to begin by talking about charging service because it's a pretty impressive ramp from the second quarter. I was just wondering if you could provide any color as to where that charging service number came in relative to what you were expecting nine days ago. And as well, if you can provide any color on the mix between what incremental revenue was generated from new stations themselves versus an increase in utilization.
spk10: Hello, this is Michael Farkas. You know, again, obviously we're seeing more people traveling today, and that's going to impact charging station revenues considerably. You know, there are more people on the roads. And as you could see from EV sales, you're seeing more EVs specifically on the road. So that's been pretty impactful. Michael, you want to grab the second part of the question?
spk08: If you could repeat that. Yes.
spk09: We saw a strong second, third quarter growth in our charging station, you know, quarter over quarter from the third quarter of last year. Uh, you know, part of it was the ramp up because of the, um, because obviously, you know, lower utilization from, uh, COVID, you know, in 2020. Uh, but we have a lot more, you know, there's a lot more chargers that are also in the ground that we're, that we're operating, that we own and operate. So, uh, and we all, and also a contribution to that is, is blue corner. Remember they're, they, they're, they're mixed. Uh, they are also owner operator, uh, business like we are in selling, as well as selling chargers. So there was a contribution that comes. So we've had a mix. We don't have a specific percentage of where, but it came from all over the place. So we're very encouraged with the continuous, the growth in that charging revenues, obviously very excited. And we expect that, you know, obviously as more and more chargers are put in the ground that we own and operate to see that continued trajectory.
spk02: Understood. Okay, and then for my follow-up, pivoting to supply chain, which I'm sure you felt to some degree along with most everyone else in the world this quarter, could you provide any commentary as to where you might have felt those challenges, you know, thinking about either logistics versus component sourcing and where you expect those challenges to take you in fourth quarter and into 2022?
spk10: Okay, we've been fortunate enough not to be heavily impacted today by some of these components or shortages other than releasing newer technology. There's a protocol that's being implemented throughout the industry that's plugged to charge. So you don't need mobile applications and you don't need RFID cards. Unfortunately, that's being impacted right now. But for us getting our charging stations out there without some of that newer technology, we're doing okay. But shipments do take a bit longer than we expect. So that is impacting us a bit. We hope that it's going to be cleared up by... you know, mid to late second quarter of 2022.
spk02: Understood. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Craig Irwin at Roth Capital Partners. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk03: Good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. So, guys, you've been at this game for quite a while, right? And you've been a public company for a number of years. There was another company that reported in the last couple days that gave guidance based on a holiday season maybe causing a contraction in the miles driven with EVs and maybe demand for charging. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the historic trends you've seen in the holiday season and whether or not you think that people are actually starting to drive longer distances with their EVs, use them more? and want to show them off to the family members when these holiday events come around.
spk10: We're not experiencing the same issue as some of our competitors. I mean, you are correct. We are doing this for a long time, a very long time. We've been doing this longer than pretty much any of our competitors, especially from an own and operate position. We kind of invented the space.
spk03: Yes, you did. So the second question, I know you guys are always a little bit shy. Sorry. Sorry, Mike, Michael, I was just gonna ask my second question is, I know you guys are always a little bit shy talking about utilization on the network. So if we could maybe talk in generalizations here. It looks like you are more than double the utilization this past quarter than any preceding quarter. Actually, I would say closer to 2.5% above the utilization peak that you had in any preceding period.
spk01: Is that approximately accurate? I'm not sure we lost Michael.
spk09: Well, this is...
spk05: Go ahead, Michael, why don't you answer the question?
spk09: Yeah, no, you're right. We're seeing the increase in utilization. You know, obviously, you know, we're still, you know, in general, you know, as we've mentioned before, you know, EVs, the percentage of EVs to all vehicles is still low, right, in the ecosystem. But we're seeing that trajectory start to increase. More OEMs, more vehicles on the roads. And we are seeing that increase in utilization with many of our chargers. And, yeah, the increases, as you noted, Craig, you're seeing it as well.
spk10: By the way, back on, sorry for that technical difficulty. I guess the phone gods don't like me on these calls.
spk03: Both you and me, I think we're cut off last time. Exactly.
spk10: Exactly. I guess I'm the unlucky one and you're still on.
spk03: Well, yeah, maybe I guess, but it's this time. Last question, right? So you're clearly investing for growth here. How should we think about the expense burden in the next few quarters? Should we look at similar sequential growth over the next couple quarters? You know, what factors do you consider? in your hiring programs and your investment in market development?
spk10: We see growth increasing across the board for the next little while in this space. Will we have, you know, six and 700% growth in, you know, parts of our business? Could be. But, you know, again, we're more conservative in our approach. If we you know, over Excel and do better than we expect, that's great. But the growth is going to be in this industry. As I mentioned in what I said earlier, you know, we're talking about reaching a benchmark of about 100,000 units earlier this year. And globally, you know, we need 120 million chargers by 2030. We believe that we're going to be able to participate in deploying a lot of those charging stations, whether we own them and operate them through our Blink-Owned model or we sell our hardware to third parties. We believe we're going to participate. We've been getting some tremendous validation within the industry. And, you know, as people see more and more of our chargers, you know, on the streets, in trophy locations, in the buildings they live in, in the buildings they work in, They'll be more and more familiar with us, and I think it'll accelerate our growth as well. But this industry is going to grow for the foreseeable future, and everyone really needs to take into consideration. Remember something. It's inevitable. Probably Monday sometime, our president is signing the bill. You're talking $7.5 billion being invested in deploying charging stations throughout the United States. Just historically looking at how we've been able to participate on these grants and rebates, we should be able to extract a lot of that money, whether it's our customers using that capital to deploy charging stations or us getting as much of it as possible for us to deploy charging stations that we own ourselves. So right now, historically, we've never seen a business um that that that is in such a growth phase and also being showered with massive capital by the government and that's the position that we're in everyone is in this who's in this industry right now is going to be able to take advantage of these opportunities it just so happens that blink um is is i believe better position than most because of our experience because of our team um you know put our team against any company out there today and hands down i think i think um we're the clear winner. We have tremendous amount of experience. Look at our team from Brendan to Miko to Richard, the experience that we have, and it's just second to none.
spk03: Great. Well, congratulations on that revenue result. I'll hop back in the queue.
spk08: You got it. Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Samir Joshi at Wainwright. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk12: Good afternoon, guys. Congratulations on the great progress. Michael, you mentioned investing across the business. When you step back and look at your priorities, is it acquiring more companies similar to Blue Corner? Is it next generation product development? And most importantly, activities around making sure you have a seat at the table when the $7.5 billion starts getting deployed and distributed.
spk10: Okay. When it comes to our M&A plans moving forward, we plan on growing organically and through acquisitions. This company's main focus has really been always to... bolster their portfolio of locations and then we've done some other acquisitions as well but our main focus is really to how are we going to get more customers and how are we going to drive down the price of our fuel to get to those customers that's our business really fueling customers with electricity um and and and bringing down the cost of our equipment while building a tremendously amazing box. That's what we work on. And our acquisitions are going to be structured around that. And again, first and foremost, it is really expanding our portfolio of locations. I've been saying this for over a decade. This is a land grab. This is still a land grab. We have 100,000 charges, as I mentioned earlier, that we achieved earlier this year. And there's a few more since then. But there's tens of millions that need to be installed here. And globally, as I mentioned, 120 million by 2030. Our objective and our goal is to have as many locations that we can have, that we own and operate, that we have long-term recurring revenue streams on an exclusive basis. And again, it's not about whether it's a level two charging station or a DC fast charging station. I think a lot of people miscategorize us and say, hey, you're the level two guys. No, it's not about that. It's about getting the land. It cost us, let's say, $5,000 or $6,000 to put a level two charging station there. And today, it may not warrant a DC fast charger, but that's now our location. Our competitors are investing in putting DC fast chargers, and some of them who have put DC fast chargers in over the last five, six, seven, eight years, almost all of their entire portfolio of DCs are going to be thrown in the garbage. And most people don't realize this in space. But what we've done is we've invested in a location at the smallest entry point as possible. And when utilization increases and it warrants spending 50, 100, $200,000 to outfit a location with DC fast chargers, we could always pull that level two out and put in whatever we want in our contracts. When we own and operate, it's not about a piece of equipment. It's not about technology. It's about us having the exclusive right to provide electric vehicle charging services at that entire location. And that location consists of, if you're on a scooter, I know it gets that granule, if you're on an e-bicycle, an e-motorcycle, an EV that you're driving in, or one of these drones that you're going to be flying in in a few years, that is our exclusive domain at that entire address. And it's not about a level two charging station or a DC fast charging station. It was about us being wise enough at that point in time to spend as little amount of money to gain access to that location on an exclusive basis. I hope I answered all your questions.
spk12: Yes, we have always appreciated you as a company that has built itself on land grab, and I'm sure you will continue to do so. One part of the question was about how to get a seat at the table for this $7.5 billion. We're there. We're there. Remember, it's about experience and history.
spk10: You have new fly-by-the-night companies that just came in. They have this thing and that thing and that thing. How many companies out there have actually developed hardware, have their own network, and have actually put in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of units actually in the ground and has the portfolio of properties that we have? I don't care if you're talking EasyGo. I don't care if you're talking Electrify America or properties we have versus them, versus any of them. Nobody is even in comparison to us, but nobody's valuing the portfolio of properties that we have. They're just looking at how easy you go or electrifying record, even ChargePoint. ChargePoint doesn't own anything. They sell a charging station. I can't tell you how many locations we go in there and pull out an old charging station, an old ChargePoint, and we now have a long-term exclusive contract with them because our contracts are sticky. And when we own a location, it's not about that one charging station. We have the entire parking lot. Every single parking space in that facility is ours. So when EVs are 5%, we could have 5 or 10 units in there. And when they're 100%, we can have 200 and 300 and 400 units in that parking lot. And when you have locations that have 13 and 14 and 15,000 spots, and you may need 20, 30, or 40% of them lit up, that's ours already. So because of that, that gives us a seat at the table because we've done this longer than anybody. We have more access to locations than anybody. We have amazing legacy customers, and there's nothing you can compare to the experience. Yeah, no, certainly.
spk12: Just one more. I'm sort of along the same lines of having land grab and stickiness. You have around 250,000 registered members. Are there any plans to increase that?
spk10: When you add up all of the different customers or users that we have on our network, it's considerably higher than that. I'm not sure. I don't remember what was posted in the latest queue. I know we were discussing it not too long ago.
spk12: It was just mentioned on the call today, someone in the cost repair department. But just wanted to see if there are like concrete efforts or plans to increase that stickiness.
spk10: Without a question. There's no question about it. We are going through a phase of growth that is beyond my dreams. The addition of Harjinder as our CTO, what you see today and what you're going to see happen over the next quarter, quarter following and the quarter after, you're going to see a blink that no one can compete with in comparative. The experience and the knowledge that Harjinder brings to the table and the team that he has, it's nothing short of amazing what we're doing and it's touching every single aspect of our business. Whether it's the IT in our company, whether it's the hardware itself, you know, the services, the systems, the functionality, the features, you're going to see a different blink over the next six to 12 months. You guys are going to be very, very surprised. There's not one thing in this company that's not going to be completely revised and taken up to levels that are not in the rest of this space. I know people say, hey, wait, maybe Michael's being a little bit aggressive, but you want to know something? For 13 years, I've been pitching EVs when everybody thought I was nuts. And everybody thought I didn't know what I was talking about. But the bottom line is, I'm telling you, the team that was built over the last little while and the outcome of their efforts are now starting to be felt. And what we're going to see over the next little while is just incredible. And I can speak of this because I know what my competitors are working on. I know what their products are. And you can see what we're going to have over the next little while. It's going to be very, very impressive. I would just tell you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
spk12: Thanks, Michael. Congratulations once again.
spk08: Thank you.
spk12: Thank you.
spk08: You've got it.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Gabe Dode at Cowan. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk07: Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. I was curious if you could maybe talk to or maybe guide us to a little bit of what you have in the backlog in terms of stations that Blink owns and operates that or maybe in some kind of construction queue that you tend on getting to over the next couple of months? Is there like a number that you can maybe talk to in terms of stations that are in progress?
spk10: I don't think we've ever publicly, you know, disclosed information like that. So, you know, we weren't really, really prepared for that here. But, you know, the best thing I could tell you is if you haven't downloaded our app, download our app. And without me disclosing any names or having to say anything, scroll in on the entire United States on that map. And then press the list button so you can see it written out by names. And then start scrolling through those names. And then you'll understand the industry validation that we're now receiving. Without tooting our own horn, do that on your own and it will speak for itself. The bottom line is we haven't ever detailed and outlined our pipeline before. And I have to speak to legal, and I don't know if this is the time to do it right now. But ultimately, again, this industry is at such a massive growth phase. We're going to see massive, massive activity now with the Biden dollars. And none of us have even felt any of that activity coming. So, you know, without a question, you're going to see major, major growth in this industry across the board, whether it's us or any of our competitors, because of what's just going on legislatively and the amount of money that's available globally.
spk08: Thanks, Mike. I hope that answered your question.
spk07: Yeah, no, we could certainly take a look at that. And then I guess just following up, didn't you, product that it looks like you'll you'll uh outline or unveil in vegas in a couple months here could you maybe talk a little bit about that how that changes the strategy these advertising uh stations and if you have any like demand or orders for anything like this so far yes we have a tremendous amount of interest in having a product like this available um we're very interested in having the product because it allows us to monetize
spk10: locations that we've developed over the last decade plus where in the past we were reliant solely upon charging station revenues or obviously our hardware sales this really allows us to incentivize property owners to put the hardware in today because you know there's instant gratification and with charging stations it's a little bit further down the road we're looking at this product both as in our own and operate model as well as being able to provide this to those that buy chargers from us and then being able to participate on the advertising side. So we're extremely excited about this. I'm sure most of you guys over the years who have heard me, I've always talked about different ideas and concepts that we're going to hopefully, once we reach a certain scale, start releasing and trying to monetize all these locations that we have. And there's quite a few different ways to do so. This is something where we believe we could make a very big impact on the market. We're not looking to give away free charging as some of our competitors do. We're looking to go ahead and have the property owner be able to participate and share in the advertising revenues as well as charging station revenues. And we believe that it's an amazing product that's going to be really very well received by property owners across the globe.
spk07: Great. Looking forward to, uh, to more details on that. And then just this last one for me, Michael, uh, is there an updated, uh, station count? Um, uh, uh, and it didn't get the number on the conference call. And I was curious, uh, of the stations that are on network, what, what, what's the percentage, what's the update on the ones that you do own and operate at this point?
spk04: Uh, Michael, do you have that on you?
spk09: Yeah, we have about, and we'll be releasing in the queue, you know, tomorrow when we file. We couldn't file today because the SEC was closed. But as part of the slides of the combined over 28,000 of what's on the Blink network, 7,200 are on the Blink network. And 4430 are L2 public festival commercial chargers. So we've been running about half and half. between what's owned and what's our own operated and what's in some of the host sales.
spk12: Got it.
spk09: Got it. Okay. Thanks, guys.
spk06: Thank you. Our next question today is coming from Stephen Dengaro at Stiefel. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk04: Thanks. Good evening, gentlemen. Good evening. Two things for me. Two things I wanted to ask you. One is, can you give us an update on the blue corner transaction? And just maybe as part of that, I'm curious, is there anything that you have learned from them that is applicable to the U.S. market that you hadn't thought of? I wish I was on video.
spk10: I wish I was on video because when you asked me about Blue Corner, I just have this massive, massive smile on my face. One of the things about Blink is most don't know, but we've grown through consolidation acquisitions. I think we're a combination of about 11 or 12 companies to date. And I used to think the Ecotality acquisition where there was about two, three hundred million invested in the company and we bought them for three point three five million dollars and all their assets and the Blink name and technology. I used to think that was the best transaction that Blink ever did. And most people are like, you know, what's wrong with Blue Corner? How is it possible you bought those guys for like twenty five million euro? There must be some major issues with that company. I have to tell you, without doubt, as of today, Blue Corner was the best, most unbelievable transaction this company has ever done. The growth that they're having, the impact that they have is just off the charts. The amount of exchanging between us and them from every facet of our businesses is across the board. And if you took that company and looked at it on its own merits, and it was a standalone company, and it was trading on its own, I would tell you the company would probably be worth a billion dollars on its own, based upon, obviously, these beautiful valuations that we have today in this space. I don't think this company has received any value for that acquisition as of yet, because I think everybody is underestimating and doesn't realize what we've accomplished with that deal. It is off the charts for the company. And we're seeing it and feeling it every single day. And what we're working on right now is completely internationalizing Blink. Because today we have, you know, a blue corner network. And then we have another Blink International network. And then we have the Blink network. In very short order, you're going to have one Blink network that handles all of these charging stations across the globe, multi-currency, multi-language. And we're going to see some amazing savings to our businesses, those that we acquired because of those advancements to our network and everything and all the technology around it. The blue corner transaction was just off the charts for us.
spk04: Great. Thank you. And the other question I just wanted to ask about as, and I know you, I know you're not going to give any specifics about the fourth quarter, but when you think about the fourth quarter from a seasonality perspective, do you do tend to see more installations and more sales? I'm going to imagine maybe more sales just because of the auto sales in general tend to be up late in the year.
spk10: No, the third quarter typically, because you have Thanksgiving and Christmas and the end of the year and all that kind of stuff, typically, as you can see, historically, we've been public through a bunch of different quarters, so you can see the trends. Historically, the fourth quarter is slower than the rest of the year. Again, we'll see how that goes. You know, it hasn't been too bad, but, you know, it's definitely without a question you do see some seasonality. And also remember, we're storing equipment, you know, throughout the country. There are certain cold areas that makes it a little bit more difficult to install. So we definitely do see some seasonality in our space.
spk04: Would that just suggest slower growth, but growth sequentially, or do you not want to comment on that?
spk10: um again you know just if you look at our prior year periods um you know over the last year and then the prior periods we're showing exponential growth from prior year periods um but as as a quarter of the year um it's slower than let's say other quarters of the year because of the seasonality and the weather and so thank you i appreciate the color thank you any other questions
spk06: Yes, our next question today is coming from Noel Parks at TUI Brothers. Your line is live. You may begin.
spk12: Hey, good afternoon. Hello.
spk11: You know, one question I wanted to ask you about, and you touched on it a little bit earlier, is that we do have a bunch of international players in the EV charging space without a big U.S. presence who are in the process of entering. But in contrast to your business model, most of them are just OEMs whose business does not extend to installations. And generally, you think more competition, not a good thing. But I'm just wondering, does the wider hardware variety that's on its way to getting offered in the U.S., is there actually an opportunity or a benefit to you potentially from that?
spk10: Okay, when you mean by installations, you mean by owning and operating or actually doing the physical installations?
spk11: Actually, either one. Most of them are kind of just equipment only of the Asian and European players that are now starting to work their way into the U.S.
spk10: Okay. Our philosophy that we developed about 13 years ago almost led us to the belief and understanding that that all hardware becomes commoditized. And I'll just give you a perfect example. The first ChargePoint unit that we ever bought, you know, in our first half of our lives, us and ChargePoint, they were our supplier. We were their biggest customer. Once we bought the Ecotality assets, we started developing our own hardware. But prior to that, we only owned and operated. We bought hardware at $6,200 for a single port unit. I think it had maybe 1.8 kilowatts of output. And today we're seeing stuff, you know, on a European side of business, maybe 1,000, 1,200 per port, and you're looking at potentially 43 kilowatts of output. So you're talking about massive commoditization, massive consolidation on pricing, massive compression, obviously, 6,200, much, much, much faster, much more robust, much more features, and you're getting down to 1,000. That's not the space that we want to focus on because that's inevitable. You're going to have charging ports for a few hundred dollars a piece that are going to have connectivity. It's ultimately going to get there. The real future of this business is owning those locations and having the recurring revenue stream over and over and over again. Hardware becomes commoditized in every business. We see that across the board. And you usually typically have a few players. We built a charging station recently. that can satisfy our customers and satisfy our property owners and make sure that we alleviate obsolescence. And we use that and built it for our business. Most of our competitors who develop hardware, as I mentioned earlier, they look for upgrade cycles. They want you to get rid of that stuff. Completely way of building hardware. And again, take a look at the map, as I mentioned earlier, and you can see a lot of industry validation of where these are going. And the reason why is because These OEMs actually benchmark units against all of us. Us and ChargePoint and SEMA and Flow and anyone and everyone you can think of, domestic and foreign. And we were selected. Why? Because we build a better box. And the reason why we do so is because our model is different. We own it. We want to have these things in the field for 10, 20 years if it's possible even. Our competitors build a different model. go differently. It's a totally different model. So we'll spend a little bit more to firm up a unit to have a little bit better of a component. Our competitors say, hey, we want a modem to go offline, and you have to buy a whole new unit in the future. We have a different way of looking at things. We want to make sure if the modems change, you go into that unit, change the modem without having to throw a whole box in the garbage. Different philosophy of building hardware because we own and operate. And we're seeing the payoff of it. We're seeing people really want to buy our hardware. I think it's going to be a very difficult market, and I think it's going to become commoditized because of the interest and because of the global nature of the space. But positioning ourselves as we have is to take advantage of the opportunities while they exist. So while there's an opportunity to sell hardware, we're a key player in that space. While there's an opportunity to provide networking services to others besides ourself, we're in that space. But our real business, what we look at, where we're going to be in 10 and 20 years from now is owning those charging stations and making money every single time you fuel that vehicle.
spk11: Right, right. Got it. Thanks. And for the ad revenue that you're envisioning with the new project you're going to be launching, I know it's early stage with this, but is there anything you can talk about as far as what the sales channels are that you might envision for selling the ad revenue?
spk10: Okay. First off, I want you to understand when we're deploying one of these advertising pedestals, they won't be installed unless we have an advertiser who's willing to commit to pay for that advertiser. So that's number one. It's not we're just going to spend money to put something in there and take some risk. That's not what we're doing. When we own and operate it, our plan is to make sure that we have the advertisers there. When we sell it to a third party, they may have their own uses for it, for their own advertising, or we'll bring the advertisers to them and monetize it that way. But we plan on, when you look at the type of locations that can use this type of service, look what we're building up. Look how many municipal contracts we have. Hospitals. movie theaters, mixed-use locations, shopping malls, on the streets. You know, there are certain locations that don't want them, right? Like you might have a high-end condo building who wants a charger but is not interested in having screens. But you have a lot of others where you have an apartment building where the property owner doesn't mind having some advertising so you can generate additional revenues. So there are so many different locations that can use the service and want the service. It's just something really, really great to have in our portfolio. And every one of our locations that want to have it, we're going to put it in as long as we can get a commitment from an advertiser so that we can monetize the location. We're not interested in having a field of dreams model with this product. This is something that we're going to have a deal in hand before we're going to be deploying these pedestals.
spk11: Great. Thanks. I think it's an important distinction. Thanks a lot.
spk08: You've got it.
spk06: Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back to Michael Farkas for closing remarks.
spk10: Thank you everyone for joining us. This is an extremely exciting time for our company and we remain focused on expanding our footprint, growing our customer base and establishing new partnerships. We look forward to speaking with you again very soon.
spk08: Thank you everybody.
spk06: Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's events. You may disconnect at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation.
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