Blink Charging Co.

Good afternoon and welcome to Blink Charging's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for analysts to ask questions at the end of today's presentation. If you should need any assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your touchtone phone. Please note this conference is being recorded. A replay of this call will be available on the investor relations page of the company's website. At this time, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Vitaly Stelia, Vice President of Investor Relations. Over to you.

Thank you, Jenny. Welcome to Blink's first quarter 2023 earnings call. On the call today, we have Brendan Jones, President and CEO, and Michael Rama, Chief Financial Officer. The discussions today will include non-GAAP references. These are reconciled to the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures in the appendix of our earnings deck. You may find the deck along with the rest of our earnings materials and other important content on Blink's Investor Relations website. Today's discussions may also include forward-looking statements about our expectations. Actual results may be different from those stated. The most significant factors that could cause actual results to differ are included on page two of the first quarter 2023 earnings deck. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year over year. Now, regarding the investor relations calendar, Blank Charging will be participating in the Cowen Sustainability Week Fireside Chat and Investor Meetings on the 6th of June. Needham Automotive Technology Conference on the 7th of June, the Roth MKM 9th Annual London Conference on June 21st and 22nd, and at the same time, the JPMorgan Energy Power Renewables Conference also on June 21st and 22nd. Please follow our announcements for additional investor events in the future. And now I will turn the call over to Brendan Jones, President and CEO of Blink Charging. Please go ahead, Brendan. Sure.

Thanks, Vitaly, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. So before I dive into our first quarter 2023 accomplishments and financial results, I'd like to say a few things. First, I'm honored to be appointed as the president and CEO of Blink Charging. I'm also proud of the incredible team at Blink and all of that we have been able to accomplish for our customers, our hosts, our clients, as well as our our shareholders, and employees. As a company and management team, we would also like to thank Michael Farkas for his time serving as our founder and our CEO. His commitment and forward thinking have helped shape Blink to become the company it is today, and that is a leader in the EV charging industry. We look forward to having Michael on our board and continue to work with him in the future. And with that, let's get on with the earnings call. So if we now allow everybody to go to slide four, I would like to provide a quick refresher on Blink and our capabilities. Blink is the only fully integrated charging company in the US market today. We offer the most flexible business models available to property owners. We control our own design, manufacturing, and network services. Our products have been designed to meet the charging needs of EV drivers, fleet companies, municipalities, auto OEMs, commercial real estate owners, and property managers. We provide a diverse choice of business models. We own and operate chargers. Of course, we sell chargers and services to our hosts. We offer hybrid options where Blink provides hardware and software, and we split the revenue with the host, and they provide the capital for installations. Our flexibility and our vertical integration of advanced hardware and software is what differentiates Blink from our competitors in the EV space today. Now let's transition to some highlights on slide six. Our first quarter total revenue increased to 121% to $21.7 million when compared with the first quarter of 2022. Now, the service revenue increased by 216%, and very importantly, our network fees, which are recurring in nature, increased by an impressive 911%. Now, that's a really big number, so I'll say it again. That was an increase of 911%, and we are very excited about these positive developments. In the first quarter, we contracted, sold, or deployed 6,461 chargers, and that represents an increase of 103% compared to the first quarter of 2022. Additionally, in Q1, Blink charging dispersed 14 gigawatts of energy across all Blink networks globally. And a key thing is most of the chargers that provided this level of energy were all level two, and they did not have demand chargers associated with which increases the cost of doing business. Subsequent to the close of the first quarter, in fact, a little over a week ago, I believe, we announced the acquisition of Envoy, an EV car sharing company by our subsidiary Blink Mobility. Previously, we announced that Blink was awarded a $7 million grant by the state of New Jersey to implement ride share services and charging for electric vehicles in underserved communities. We are pleased to welcome Envoy into the Blink Mobility family, and we'll have more announcements about the synergy of this acquisition as we move forward. If we jump on to slide seven now, on March 16th, we announced an IDIQ contract with the United States Postal Service to provide up to 41,500 EV charging stations and network services provided by Blink and others. We are very proud of the Blank team. To date, this is one of the largest fleet contracts for chargers and services in North America, and the selection process was extremely rigorous. This successful contract win is a testament not only to our products and our network, but also to our talented team. We have already shipped the first order in April, and we look forward to continued collaboration with the United States Post Office and other government entities. So now let's shift gears to slide eight. You will see the growth to date and forecasted growth for electric vehicles and EV chargers that power them. The transition to EVs is accelerating, and with our comprehensive portfolio of charging products and solutions, and our unique approach to providing flexible business models to meet all preferences, we are ideally situated to capitalize on the expected exponential demand for EV charging as more and more EVs hit the road. Now let's look at slide nine. Within the last 12 months, Blink has contracted, sold, deployed, or acquired over 38,000 chargers both domestically and internationally, bringing the total charge account for the company to nearly 73,000 chargers since Blink's inception. Now, right now, 78% of the total company-wide chargers were deployed in North America, and 22% have been deployed internationally, with the majority being in Europe. On slide 10, you will see just a partial sampling of our customers. They represent well-established commercial entities, multifamily complexes, planned communities, healthcare facilities, fleets, and municipalities around the world. Our advanced chargers, combined with flexible business models, position us very well to attract new customers and long-term contracts. For example, in addition to the United States Post Office, we signed a contract with one of the largest car dealership groups in the nation for a large number of DC fast chargers. And overall, the automotive segment is very strong for Blink. In Q1, we entered into agreements to provide chargers for over 600 different dealerships that span a variety of owners and brands. And this is out of more than 3,000 dealerships that we've already installed to date. Some of the other notable customers in this quarter include one of the largest parking structure operators in Belgium called APCO. And we continue to evaluate sales and installation opportunities with CBRE Property Management Company in Europe and Asia. In addition, we continue to provide chargers to our long-term partner, Inner Energy. In fact, in Q1, we shipped over $1 million worth of chargers to Inner Energy. Now let's go and look at slide 11. You can see examples of our innovative product portfolio. Now, we have a wide variety of projects ranging from residential, L2 chargers to high-powered DC fast chargers, as well as our vision charger. With these offerings, we service both residential and a variety of commercial customers. The ETA for our innovative vision charger is the end of Q3. Now let's go look at slide 12. You can see our current selection of DC fast chargers. We think it is important to reiterate that Blink is a global, company addressing the demand for power and different DC installation settings that vary around the world. In Q1, we contracted for the sale of approximately 300 DC chargers, and our backlog to date includes approximately another 400 chargers that we expect to be on the Blink network once launched. This makes it a minimum of 700 DC chargers that we expect to commercialize during 2023, and that's the minimum. Now let's go look at slide 13. In 2022, we completely redesigned and launched our Blink network and Blink charging mobile apps. The strength of our network is another competitive advantage, as it allows drivers to find chargers, book sessions faster and easier, while enabling our site hosts more flexibility in managing their stations with added features seamlessly integrating chargers into everyday life. And as we've said before, this is available on both iOS and the Android platform. Now let's look at another topic, synergies. We announced in Q4, just to remind you, and we did this with the help of McKinsey Consulting. We performed an extensive analysis to discover and outline synergies with a focus on our acquisition of Semiconnect. Now, as a result of this analysis, analysis we identified are now targeting a total of $28 million in synergies related to this acquisition. This includes an additional $1.3 million in revenue synergies we identified during Q1 of 2023. Today, we have captured $5.3 million of operating expense synergies as of March 31, 2023. We expect to begin realizing these expense reductions and revenue synergies in Q2 and Q3 of this year. Now, while we realize there are synergies from the Semiconnect acquisition, in addition, we expect to achieve incremental synergies globally from integrating the acquired networks into the state-of-the-art Blink network. This summer, we will have all Blink entities combined under one network. This will eliminate expenses related to engineering and maintenance of legacy networks today. With this, I will pass the presentation on to Michael Rahmer, our CFO. Michael?