Blink Charging Co.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blink Charging Company fourth quarter and year-end 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Vitali Stelia, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ali. Welcome to Blink's fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. On this call today, we have Brendan Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Rama, Chief Financial Officer. Today's discussions 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 differ from those stated. The most significant factors that could cause actual results to differ are included on page two of the fourth quarter 2023 earnings deck. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year-over-year. Now, regarding the investor relations calendar, Blink will be participating in taking one-on-one investor meetings at a few upcoming conferences. The first one will be the Roth MKM Investor Conference in Dana Point, California on the 17th of March. The second one will be JPMorgan Energy Conference on the 17th of June in New York City. Please follow our announcements and the Investor Relations website for additional events that we will book in the future. I will turn the call now over to Brendan Jones, President and CEO of Blink Charging. Go ahead, Brendan.

Thanks, Vitaly, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this call today. Well, to sum it up, 2023 was a historic year for Blink. It was marked by significant achievements and exponential growth. Now, as some of you know, Blink over the past four years has successfully integrated six strategic acquisitions. And in 2023, we began to demonstrate the powerful consolidated potential of the Blink Enterprises. Now, not only did we leverage our advanced product portfolio and services, but we also began to see tangible benefits from our newly enhanced network launched in 2022. Organizationally, we are emphasizing a culture of continuous improvement and have begun to observe synergies and efficiencies that positively impacted 2023 results across all of our businesses. Operationally, we streamlined our sales, engineering, logistics, and distribution while expanding our manufacturing footprint near Washington, D.C. to capitalize on additional synergies, and opportunities for cost optimization, and a little more on that later in this presentation. Now, if we move to the numbers as illustrated on slides four and five, our total revenues were $140.6 million, marking an impressive year-over-year growth of 130%, and a remarkable seven-fold increase compared to 2020 revenues. Now, let's talk about that again. Seven-fold increase in just two years. Our fourth quarter 2023 revenues were a Q4 record of $42.7 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 89%. our 2023 service revenues grew 111% year over year, amounting to $26.4 million. Now, within this figure, network fees grew 71% to $7.5 million, and Q4 2023 service revenue reached $7.9 million. Now, in even better news from a financing perspective, if you flip to slide six, We previously discussed raising additional funds to guide Blink towards profitability. I am pleased to announce that we substantially strengthened Blink's balance sheet by raising $113 million in gross proceeds via our existing ATM facility. We took advantage of favorable market conditions and did it opportunistically at scale and in a very, very cost-effective way. As a result, we delevered our balance sheet and significantly reduced our interest expense by paying off promissory notes and accrued interest of $45.5 million. With our current visibility, we anticipate that our existing cash balance will be sufficient to reach our positive EBITDA adjusted rate target in December of 24 and beyond. If we now look at slide seven, for full year 2024, we are targeting revenues between $165 to $175 million and a gross margin of approximately 33%. We are also reconfirming our target of achieving positive adjusted EBITDA run rates by December of 2024. Now let's jump over to slide eight. We show the different actions that continue to materialize, that will continue to materialize, excuse me, in 2024 to achieve our adjusted EBITDA target. First, solid revenue growth is expected to contribute significantly to adjusted EBITDA. We emphasize not only the sales quantity, but also the quality of new customers, especially fleets, as they play a crucial role in financing our company's growth. During 2023, we saw important fleet wins in the United States, including the post office and Mack Trucks, just to name a few. We also prioritized revenue generated from our existing customers as an optimal way to finance growth. Second, we anticipate gross margin improvement as we continue to insource a large portion of our product mix. Our decision to expand our Bowie, Maryland facility aligns perfectly with our growth strategy and we are very pleased to have the facility open with production underway. Third, expense management and cost avoidance are currently underway throughout the entire company. We've also implemented a leading software tool to assist in planning and monitoring expenses at all levels of the company we are pleased with this capability as it enables robust scenario planning and accountability for every department and finally we anticipate the ev market to maintain its recent momentum benefiting not only blink but more importantly the entire industry if we move on to page now despite various media media stories we remain very optimistic about the EV market and the continued growth. This optimism is fueled by the decreasing cost of electric vehicles and the continuous expansion and improvement of charging infrastructure. The network effect is now taking hold. Now look at the numbers. In 2023, EVs accounted for one of every five vehicles sold globally. In the US in 2023, we saw an increase and EV adoption accounting for 8% of all new cars sold within the United States. Now, if we look at California, EVs represented 25% of all new car sales. To provide context, Bloomberg New Energy Finance anticipates EV penetration in the U.S. to reach approximately 13% in 2023, marking a significant 500 basis points in expansion in just one year. Now in Europe, another region where we are active and have three different offices, the EV penetration rate throughout the entire European content stood at 18% of car sales. But if you start to split this up and look at various countries, France, UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the percent is much higher. This figure is projected to rise across both Western and Eastern Europe to about 22% in 2024, with a target of 80% by 2030. And we know that's a big number, but it's really not that far fetched. As many of you may know, about 90% of all cars sold in Norway are EVs. Several larger European countries are closely monitoring this trend, and we at Blink are actively studying and adapting to this evolving landscape. Now let's turn to page 10. The proliferation of EVs globally requires rapid improvement in EV charging infrastructure. According to McKenzie's new data, the United States is projected to have over 28 million chargers by 2030. And that's from a bit over $4 million today. The global market is expected to grow at a 25% CAGR through 2030. And the investment required for this is expected to be about $260 billion. And if you look across all major research done in this area, it doesn't matter whether it's McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, or Bloomberg, most chargers are expected to be level two chargers. because drivers will mainly charge vehicles where the vehicle will idle most of the time. This is backed by the US Department of Transportation, which shows that on average, vehicles sit about 95% of the time. On page 11, in terms of deployments, since Blink's inception, we have sold, contracted, or deployed 89,825 chargers. 78% of this is in North America, with the majority of the remaining chargers are in Europe. Now on to slide 12. You will see images of our advanced product portfolio. Today, we can satisfy the demands of any customer from the product and software perspective. Our versatile level two chargers are used in multiple commercial, residential, and fleet applications. At the same time, we have made significant strides with our DC fast chargers. as you can see on the lower left section of the slide. And importantly, our chargers already support the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, which we believe will only benefit Blink as more drivers will be able to easily access Blink chargers and charge on our chargers. And of a particular note, just this week we celebrated the grand opening of our new manufacturing facility near Washington, D.C. which will further drive our gross margin expansion while improving product quality and reliability. Federal, state, and local government officials were present to celebrate with us this significant milestone. And if you look at slide 13, we look forward to supporting government programs when it comes to electrifying their fleets and providing EV charging infrastructure in their jurisdictions. Now, the production that is underway at the facility embodies the latest lean manufacturing practices focusing on efficiency and continuous improvement. We anticipate that it will support an annual production capacity of up to 50,000 chargers and has been designed for flexibility to adapt to our future products and manufacturing needs. Now, Of a new announcement, in addition to the manufacturing facility, we have established our global headquarters at the same location near the nation's capital. We believe this offers multiple benefits. It brings us closer to our manufacturing operations, allows for better team engagement, and brings us closer to some of our largest customers. Furthermore, being located near policymakers involved in shaping The federal government's transition to electric vehicles is advantageous as we continue to play a pivotal role in this transformative journey. Now, if we go to slide 14, over the years, Blink was able to acquire a number of prominent customers and collaborations with some of the largest fleets globally, automotive companies, commercial and multifamily real estate enterprises, as well as prominent hospitality venues. In 2024 and beyond, we will be adding to this list of prominent customers. Now, with this, I'm going to turn the presentation now over to our CFO, Michael Rama, to give you some additional financial detail. Michael?