Blink Charging Co.

Greetings and welcome to the Blink Charging Company fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode and a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. And please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Vitali Stelia, VP of Treasury and Finance for Blink Charging. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ali, and welcome to Blink's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. With us today, we have Mike Battaglia, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Berkovich, 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. Extra results may differ from those stated, and the most significant factors that could cause extra results to be different are included on page two of the fourth quarter 2025 earnings deck. unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year over year. For additional events, please follow our media releases in the events section of Blink's investor relations website. And now I'll turn the call over to Mike Battaglia, President and CEO of Blink Charging. Mike, please go ahead.

All right, great. Thanks, Vitaly. And good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm proud to report that the fourth quarter of 2025 marks a pivotal moment for Blink Charging. the most significant transformation in this company's history, our Blink Forward initiative substantially met its 2025 objectives. This quarter represents the transition from rebuilding the foundation to preparing the business for its next phase of growth.

We started the year with close to six Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, we have lost our speaker temporarily. One moment, please, and we shall get him back in the call. Sorry about that, everyone. I think I'm back.

This quarter represents the transition from rebuilding the foundation to preparing the business for its next phase of growth. We started the year with close to 600 people globally, and today we operate with fewer than 300 highly focused and skilled team members. We have fundamentally reshaped how this company operates, became leaner, disciplined, and focused on financial excellence, and the results are showing. Let me walk you through what Blink Forward has accomplished. When I took over the role of president and CEO a year ago, it was apparent to me that Blink should operate as a financially focused business, that we should fundamentally change our culture and advance with a different vision for Blink. That vision was centered on building a company that can stand on its own financially, operate with discipline, and scale profitably over time. We launched the Blink Forward Restructuring Plan in May, 2025, as we set out to accelerate our path to profitability and focus on what matters, including long-term sustainable growth. I'm pleased to say that we have accomplished nearly all of the objectives that we set out to achieve in several critical ways. Our shift to contract manufacturing is now fully complete and operational. We have exited in-house production and are leveraging third-party manufacturing partners in both the United States and India. This gives us greater flexibility, optimizes working capital, lowers overhead, and improves supply chain resilience, all while retaining full ownership of our proprietary intellectual property with hardware, firmware, and software. Importantly, our inventory position has been dramatically improved. and we maintain a lean balance sheet that allows us to be agile and nimble to evolving market needs. We reassessed and subsequently wrote off approximately $6 million of legacy inventory at year end as part of this realignment. And our go-forward inventory levels will reflect right-sized and asset-like positions, targeting around $15 million on the balance sheet. Moving to slide four, we took bold actions throughout 2025. First, our operating expense reductions have been significant. On an adjusted basis, fourth quarter operating expenses were approximately $17.1 million, a decrease of approximately 32% from the beginning of a 2025 adjusted level of $25.2 million. If we annualize our total Q4 adjusted operating expenses, and compare against full-year 2024 adjusted operating expenses, you would see a reduction of $39 million year over year. That is a 36% reduction, and I'll emphasize that again. That's a 36% reduction. Importantly, these reductions were not about shrinking the company. They were about creating the operating leverage required to support sustainable growth and innovation going forward. Second, while some of our competitors are burdened by capital-intensive asset-heavy practices, our move to a more agile contract manufacturing model and better working capital discipline will serve as a key pillar in our pursuit of profitability. This is foundational to our ability to deploy EV infrastructure at scale while maintaining financial flexibility and discipline. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we have accelerated the shift in our revenue mix towards higher quality, repeatable, and recurring service revenues. In Q4, our service revenues reached $14.7 million, up 62% year over year. Service revenues represented 54% of our total revenue, up from 32% in Q4 of last year. And for full year 2025, service revenues grew 45% year over year, to $49.3 million. And as we've said before, this is the future of Blink. Our strategy was further validated by our successful follow-on equity raise in December. We achieved our target of $20 million with a clean, no-warrant raise with the majority of proceeds directed toward expanding our DC fast-charging network, which we expect will provide repeatable, high-quality revenue streams. This is central to our strategy of building a durable, profitable business. Our Blink Forward strategy has been built on six pillars, customer-driven market leadership, sustainable profitability, expanding charging solutions, capturing market share, developing recurring revenue, and securing cost-efficient capital. Each of these pillars has guided our transformation, and we will continue to execute against them into 2026 as we balance growth, innovation and profitability in the years ahead. On slide five, you can see the trajectory of our quarterly performance throughout 2025. Revenue has stabilized in the $27 million range across Q2, Q3 and Q4, while we have fundamentally improved the quality and mix of revenue. The story here is clear. We have right-sized the business, shifted our focus toward repeatable and recurring revenue streams, higher margin product sales, and dramatically reduced our cost structure. With the business now right-sized and stabilized, our focus is shifting from restructuring to scaling what works. Now, let's turn to fourth quarter highlights on slide seven. Total revenue in Q4 was $27 million compared to $28 million in Q4 of 2024. While top line revenue was relatively flat, this was a deliberate outcome of our strategic pivot to a lean asset-like blank that is more agile and adaptive to changing market realities. We are being selective about product sales, focusing on high margin accretive opportunities while investing in growing our repeatable and recurring service revenue base. This disciplined approach positions us to pursue growth opportunities that are accretive and aligned with long-term value creation. Gap gross margin in Q4 was 15.8%. This was primarily impacted by $5.9 million in non-cash inventory adjustments related to our transition to contract manufacturing and our general direction of becoming an asset-like company with a robust and lean balance sheet. Excluding these one-time items, our adjusted gross margin was 37.8%. much improved from our Q3 2025 adjusted gross margin of 34.5%. We are highly competitive within our industry and expect gross margins to improve as we move through 2026, with a target of approximately 35% on a full year basis. The quality of our revenue tells the real story. Charging service revenue grew 49% year-over-year to $9.3 million, driven by our expanding Blink-owned charging network and strong performance from our European markets during Q4. For full year 2025, network fees grew 53% year-over-year to $12.2 million, driven by an increase in chargers added across our network, notably DC chargers, which carry higher network fees. On slide 8, I want to reiterate that that our Blink-owned charger portfolio continues to be a powerful growth engine. Charging revenue from Blink-owned sites grew substantially year over year, and our DC fast charging revenue from Blink-owned locations in the United States grew over 200% in 2025. As a result of our successful capital raise in December, we have approximately 30 DC fast charging sites representing about 150 ports in various stages of review and construction. And as these come online, they will represent a significant source of future repeatable and recurring revenue. I'd also like to highlight some of our recent DC fast charging installations, including our portfolio of DC chargers with Royal Farms. Revenue in 2025 was up over 300% to nearly $950,000. In 2024, those locations delivered $225,000 in revenue on nearly the same number of chargers. Most of this growth was driven by higher utilization as drivers increasingly recognized Blink as a growing provider of DC fast charging services. And we recently activated a new Denver area site featuring Blink's most powerful DC fast chargers to date, delivering up to 600 kilowatts. Early utilization is trending upward, reflecting strong demand for ultra-fast charging. This deployment demonstrates the type of high-power, fast-charging sites that support predictable dwell times and represent compelling long-term growth and value creation opportunities. Turning to slide 10, our expense discipline continued to improve in Q4, excluding non-cash charges for goodwill and intangibles impairment, for our mobility segment, and expenses eliminated on a go-forward basis. Operating expenses came in at approximately $17.1 million. That is down from $25.2 million in Q1 2025. We have reduced our adjusted operating expense run rate by over 30% over the course of the year, reducing annualized expenses by over $32 million from the run rate at the beginning of 2025. Cash management also remained strong. Our cash burn for the quarter was approximately $2 million, comparable to Q3's $2.2 million, and a fraction of the levels we experienced in the first half of 2025. This continued discipline in working capital and cost management is building a foundation for sustainable operations. And remember, Blink has no debt on the balance sheet. This level of financial discipline gives us flexibility and a strong foundation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Michael Berkovich, our Chief Financial Officer, to review the financials in more detail, and I will circle back at the end of the call with our outlook. Michael?

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. 2025 was a monumental year in the history of being charging, and I'm so proud to be a part of it. This was a year defined by building a stronger financial foundation and positioning the business for sustainable operations going forward. Let's turn to slide 12 for our selected financials. Q4 2025 revenues were $27 million compared to $28 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. For the full year, total revenues were $103.5 million compared to $124 million in 2024. Product revenues for the fourth quarter were $11 million compared to $17.2 million in Q4 of last year. As Mike described earlier, this reflects our deliberate strategic decision to prioritize quality of revenue over quantity. We are focused on higher margin product opportunities as being disciplined in the deals we pursue. With our focused approach for evaluating sales and our transition to contract manufacturing, we expect product margins to improve as we move through 2026. This reflects a more disciplined, scalable approach to product revenue that supports long-term profitability. Service revenue increased 62% to $14.7 million in Q4 2025, up from $9 million in the fourth quarter of last year. For the full year, service revenue grew 45% to $49.3 million. BizGrowth validates our strategy of investing in Blink-owned and operated infrastructure and network services. These service revenues are repeatable and recurring in nature, contributing to improved revenue quality and productability. Other revenues, which consist of warranty fees, grants and rebates, and other revenue items, were $1.3 million in the first quarter, compared to $1.8 million in the Q4 of last year. The decrease was primarily due to the shift of procuring third-party extended warranty contracts resulting in modifications to the way our warranty revenue was recognized previously from a growth revenue basis to a net revenue basis. GAAP gross profit in Q4 was $4.3 million or 15.8% of revenue. This compares to gross profit of $4.4 million or 15.7% of revenue in Q4 of 2024. I want to call out that Q4 included approximately $5.9 million in non-cash adjustments, mainly in inventory, related to our manufacturing transition and a year-end inventory rationalization. Excluding these items, gross margin was approximately 37.8%, significantly above the 34.5% as we reported in Q3 of this year, and year-over-year gross margin improvement of 1100 basis points. And I want to repeat, 1100 basis points. For the full year 2025, gross margin was 24.6% on the reported basis, impacted by various non-cash inventory charges throughout the year. Excluding those charges, full year gross margin was approximately 36% even. Turning to operating expenses, total operating expenses reported in Q4 were $37 million, which included $17.9 million related to impairment of goodwill, and $800,000 in intangible assets for our mobility segment. Excluding these non-cash items, standout operating expenses were $18.7 million. And when we further exclude approximately $1.2 million of expenses that have been eliminated on a go-forward basis and are not expected to recur, adjusted operating expenses were approximately $17.1 million. This compares to adjusted operating expenses of $25.2 million in Q1 of 2025, representing a 32% reduction over the course of the year. These reductions reflect structural changes to our cost base rather than temporary measures. Compensation expenses decreased to $10.5 million from $11.7 million in Q3. sequential improvement of 10% and reflecting the full benefit of our headcount reductions. G&A expenses came down to $3.4 million from $5.3 million in Q3, a 36% sequential reduction, driven by continued cost optimization across the organization. The G&A for fourth quarter was $3.4 million, which includes a $1.3 million reversal of bed debt provision following successful recovery efforts. Without this reversal, our G&A expenses would have been $4.7 million in Q4. Net loss for Q4 was $32.7 million on a reported basis, primarily driven by the non-cash charge of financials. Adjusted net loss was approximately $6.9 million. Full year net loss was $83.4 million on a reporting basis, compared to $201.3 million in prior year. Full year loss per diluted share was 76 cents compared to $2 loss in fiscal 2024. Total adjusted EPS in 2025 was a loss of 63 cents compared to a total adjusted EPS loss of 64 cents in the same period of 2024. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2025 was a loss of $10.3 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $14.8 million in the same period of 2024. Normalizing for $6.6 million in recurring headwinds, specifically to a $5.9 million in inventory rationalization and $1.4 million in blue-forward restructuring compensation costs, and adjusting for 700,000 G&A benefits, our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to only $3.7 million.

The result represents a substantial multi-quarter improvement in financial performance.

Total adjusted EBITDA for 2025 was a loss of $58.1 million compared to the total adjusted EBITDA loss of $52.7 million in 2024. Regarding our balance sheet and liquidity, as we previously announced, we successfully raised capital during the fourth quarter, strengthening our financial position to fund our DC fast charging investment program. Cash burn for the quarter was $2 million, comparable to Q3's $2.2 million. This consistency demonstrates that our working capital and cost discipline is durable and not a one-time in nature. Looking at our business outlook, I would like to provide guidance across four key areas. Number one, revenue growth. For fiscal year 2026, We are targeting total revenue in the range of $105 to $160 million, representing 1% to 11% growth over 2025. This is driven by continued expansion in repeatable and recurring service revenues, selective margin-accretive strategic product sales, and the contribution from our growing DC fast-charging footprint, as Mike covered earlier on this call. This revenue target range is particularly encouraging and it represents the clean growth coming out of our restructuring plan last year. Following more, we are continuing to lean into our DC fast charging network strategy. While we are investing heavily in these sites today, we expect to see the initial revenue contribution from this investment in late 2026, with 2027 serving the first full year of scale revenue from the DC network expansion and our transition to a more robust recurring and appearing revenue model. This growth is driven by the core operating framework we have established, rather than a balance sheet expansion or elevated cost structures, patterns that we see with some of our competitors. Number two, gross margins. We are targeting gross margins of approximately 35% for fiscal 2026. The specific level will depend on product revenue mix between L2 and DC chargers, market conditions, and the impact of tariffs on our supply chain. We see an opportunity for 100 to 300 basis points of gross margin improvement as we realize the full benefits of contract manufacturing and favorable revenue mix shift. Number three, cash flow and liquidity. Operational discipline has directly translated to our bottom line and cash preservation goals. For the second consecutive quarter, Our total cash burn, including essential capital investment, has stabilized at approximately $2 million per quarter, and we can see the same pattern in Q1 of 2026. Through the successful execution of our working capital and liquidity management programs, we have expanded our runway, allowing us to find our DC fast-charging growth initiative from a position of strength. Lastly, number four, pass to profitability. With operating expenses down approximately 30% year-over-year and significantly leaner operations, we are aggressively working toward operational cash flow break-evens. We anticipate significantly reduced adjusted EBITDA loss compared to prior periods. This improvement is supported by the operating leverage created through our cost reductions and revenue mix shifts. We also expect continued operational improvements to position the company for profitability. This is the target for us, an internal measure and KPI, and we will continue to pull levers across both revenue growth and expense optimization to achieve it. And with the few levers that we are targeting is our revenue growth and product sales that are focused and disciplined in various tactical opportunities to shed significant costs that are not related to headcount but operational excellence. We believe that with successful execution that we have already exhibited during this last year, we will see additional increases in our margins. The themes for improvement include optimizing charging demand fees, simplifying our payment processing and sync our fee structures, and rationalizing charger assets. We have concluded an internal review and with a unified effort, this item is with progress tracked and reported accordingly. Some of our peers continue to struggle with legacy debt and high cash burdens. Our no debt, lean balance sheet position allows us for aggressive, capital efficient, DC soft infrastructure deployment, a significant difference as we move towards profitability while maintaining financial flexibility and discipline. I will now turn back over to Mike to wrap it up. Go ahead, Mike.

All right. Thanks, Michael. And the call didn't drop, which is nice. So the fourth quarter and full year 2025 represents a defining chapter for Blink Charging. As we continue to blink forward into 2026, our focus is on building a business that can stand and grow on its own. We have transformed this company from the ground up and accomplished several notable milestones, including reducing our headcount and operating expenses significantly, transitioning to contract manufacturing and improving working capital, reducing quarterly cash burn from $15 million to $2 million, improving our repeatable and recurring revenue mix, raising $20 million with favorable terms, and beginning deployment of our high-speed DC charging footprint. Since my time as CEO, I've been clear about what we set out to do, and we've executed against it. We said it, we did it, and the results are visible in the business today. That same disciplined approach continues to guide how we operate as we move into 2026 and beyond. So I would like to extend a thank you to the Blink team for its resilience and focus throughout this past year of transformation. And I would like to thank our customers and drivers who rely on Blink to provide energy to their vehicles every day. So with that, let's move on to Q&A. Operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. And you may press star 2 if you wish to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is coming from Craig Irwin with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is live.

Good evening, gentlemen. Congratulations on strong execution in this environment. So, Michael, I wanted to start by asking about the impact of your restructuring, right, the way you've repositioned the business for better profitability in 26. The big item, I guess, is the repositioning of your manufacturing and the change in strategy around the way you're managing working capital. That's generated a lot of improvement for you, like a very significant reduction in cash needs. But the overall benefit is still cutting in, at least as far as I understand. Can you help us unpack how this continues to benefit you over the course of this year? You got to burn down to, was it $2 million a quarter, which is incredible. Yeah, better than last quarter. I mean, again, but how does this continue to benefit the organization over the course of this year? You know, does this bring down OPEX further? Does it improve overall cash needs? And, you know, can you talk about the facility footprint? Are there likely changes now that you've made the key changes at the company?

You know, Craig, let me – I'll start, and then I'm sure Michael is going to jump in on this. So – You know, one of the things that we introduced into Blink this year is, and we talk about it all the time, is a notion of radical simplicity. So we use that against everything we're doing at the company. So how can we reduce complexity throughout every facet of this organization in order to enable focused execution on the core parts of the business? So let me... Let me unpack that a little bit. So when you look at this major shift that you referenced from in-house production to contract manufacturing, what's the benefit? Well, first of all, and I'm going to start with the bottom line and then work back. The bottom line, our cost per unit did not change. So think about that. We were building units ourself. We outsourced them to contract manufacturers, and the cost per unit stayed the same. So what's the implication of that? The implication of that is that we don't have to manage the entire supply chain. We don't have to stock parts. We don't have to forecast individual components. We have significantly reduced inventory risk on our balance sheet. And so then it brings us to a point where we can simply plan for demand. So we can forecast out one SKU, two SKUs, five SKUs. rather than 500 SKUs associated with components and manufacturing. It also allows us to carry less inventory, so to be far more efficient from a working capital standpoint and to think of the business more in a just-in-time inventory-type environment. So we've never built DC fast chargers. If you think about it, we've always sourced them, and now we're just simply extending that and doing that the same way. on the L2 side. So, Michael, I think you probably have some perspective on this as well.

Yeah, absolutely, Craig. This is a great question and really one of the most maybe important shifts in the business over the past few quarters. The improvement is really driven by a combination of factors that Mike was mentioning. First, we've become significantly more disciplined in everything we do. Cash burn on collections, right? We're collecting faster and more consistently than at any point historically, which will have a meaningful impact on our working capital. Two quarters in a row, as you said, and I already provided a hint in the Q1 2026. Second, we structurally reduce operating expenses through the actions we have taken under the Blink Forward initiative. The one-time benefit, this is not a one-time benefit, this is a reset. complete reset of the cost base. And as Mike talked about reducing inventory levels, this is all part of our transition to contract manufacturing and really becoming more disciplined and focused. And it freed up cash and reduced balance sheet intensity, which is, again, if you're comparing companies, our balance sheet is very light. And it will allow us to be nimble, allow us to be agile. So when we put all this together, you're seeing a much more efficient operating model and we expect to continue managing cash burn and our business at this reduced level going forward.

Excellent, excellent. Well, that's big progress.

And it actually segues nicely into my next question. So, you know, the investment community is very realistic about the EV and charging demand environment right now. So I don't think anyone is going to not understand your revenue guidance for this year. The one area, though, that I think is a nice surprise is the gross margin line. So this doesn't benefit directly from the working capital and manufacturing strategy changes that you've implemented, you know, if the cost per unit is unchanged. So clearly mixed and the internal initiatives, you know, it's your control, right? This is your initiative that's driving this. this gross margin execution better or execution outlook better than what we've been seeing and what we've been expecting. Can you maybe just, you know, talk a little bit more about, you know, the opportunity on the margin side, you know, how this has come together for you, how long you've been working on this and, you know, your confidence in this trajectory because it clearly is something that's been under your control. You've made changes and it's delivering.

Yeah, yeah, it's actually a great question. And again, I'll start and I'll let Michael. I think we're excited to answer this question. So first of all, when you look at the progress we made during 2025, we restructured the business with really big levers. You know, we reduced headcount, you know, nearly 50%. We looked at software subscriptions and all of the normal places that you would go in order to try to cut costs. We rationalized facilities. So, you know, we exited some of our facilities in order to save costs. I mean, we did many, many things, but they were big and visible. Now what we're doing going into 2026 is exactly the question you asked. What we're saying, the way we look at the business is we said, okay, those things were visible. What are the underlying costs that are below the surface, that are not immediately visible, that affect our margins. And so Michael mentioned them a bit in his comments. There are things like warranty costs, shipping costs, SIM card fees. So a SIM card, like a cell phone SIM card, they also go into chargers. So how much are we paying for those? Payment service transaction fees so that we are incurring on our network. energy management in terms of things like demand fees and how can we better procure energy so that we don't get hit by demand fees on DC fast chargers. So there's multiple things that we're looking at that will directly affect margins.

Mike, that's exactly right.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, the improvements are very different from what we did in 2025. And I'm not going to, again, call out the levers themselves that we talked about. But in a nutshell, 2025, we focused on larger structural levers, as you said, reduced exposure to low margin activities for structured operations. We set the cost base 26. As you said, below the service improvement, it's all about operational optimization. And that's what's exciting about it because we're coming out of the restructuring so strong. And individually, those are smaller levers, but collectively they can drive meaningful margin expansion, and we believe that this will help us as we continue moving forward with our multi-year strategy.

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a whole lot of sense. So then, you know, multi-year strategy, right, again, dovetails perfectly into my last question, if I may. So, you know, we all know that you guys have been working so hard this last year to develop a strategy to get to EBITDA positive, right? I know you guys want to make money, not just grow fast and grow at the best rate you can given the overall demand environment, but I know you want to do that while making money. You know, are there any major items you can call out for us, you know, as external observers of the company? that might facilitate that? You know, clearly revenue is one that's environment driven, but are there other things like changes in the portfolio or gaps that you'd like to close that can get you there? And, you know, is there something we can maybe consider as a timeline or a, you know, a loose goal given that, you know, I guess the board has to approve disclosure of targets, but if we just talk You know, aspirations. That might be a loophole. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Hey, Craig, again, I'll start. So first of all, we are hell-bent at this company on getting a profitability, and we're not going to wait for the market to take us there. And I want to say that again. We are not going to wait for the market to take us there. So we want to continue this theme of, that we set out last year and into right now, which is, look, we're going to tell you what we feel comfortable telling you in terms of the operating environment of the business, and then we want to deliver on that and then hopefully surpass that. So we're not giving guidance right now, but we're going to continue to optimize on the expense side And then, you know, Craig, it's interesting. I mean, if you look at, you know, for me personally, a CEO of the company, last year was all inward focused. It was cutting expenses. It was restructuring. It was making sure that we right-sized the business. This year, I'm going to leave that to my compatriot, Michael Berkovich, and my whole focus is working with the sales team on growing top-line revenue because that's what we need to do. And within growing top-line revenue – We need to really understand and really go after and really stay focused on the product sales segments that are moving in the industry, not phantom segments that people keep hoping for, but where is the actual activity happening and how can Blink maximize its position within those particular verticals? So we're not going to run after everything. We're going to run after the stuff that makes sense to run after where we see a market. So, Michael, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

Yeah, Mike, thank you for that. And for me, it's all about two things that you mentioned, operational excellence. Last year we hit a lot of bulls and a lot of, you know, things worked out for us. This year is going to be operational excellence, going and turning every stone that you already turned and turning it again. Sales. smart sales with a higher gross margin and complete the shift of the repeatable and recurring revenue that we already talked about. We have inspiration through our DC fast charging network to produce more higher margin, repeatable sales that will help us to get to profitability. We do provide guidance that this year we anticipate a significantly lower loss on our adjusted EBITDA. And we're seeing that even from Q4, the number that we got to under $4 million, and we continue driving it down. From here, we need to continue investing in the business, continue doing what we did, and we'll get there. This is something that I know we all as a team working on, correct? And there's a lot of opportunities, as I said, for 100 to 300 basis points on the gross margin, and then also on operating expenses. We'll continue doing that, but we're very, very focused on what matters. And the business and profitability are incredibly important to us.

Thank you.

Our next question is coming from Ryan Finkst with B. Reilly. Your line is live.

guys thanks for taking my questions um i guess just just on the first one the revenue range for 2026 could you talk about the cadence a little bit um for the year and then maybe what are some of the drivers that could get you towards the higher end of the range uh you know versus them yeah so uh so cadence wise um you know if you look at our business historically

2024 was, I think, a little bit of an anomaly. But if you look back, at least since I joined in 2020, the revenue pattern kind of stays the same, which is the first quarter typically experiences some seasonality, and then it starts to march up from Q1 throughout the year. So I think we're going to see some of the same. If you... looking at how we get to the higher end of our range, some of it is going to be market activity in terms of EV sales. So if you look at the predictions of EV sales or the forecasts of EV sales, it's following exactly what we expected, which is after expiration of the EV tax credit, EV sales fell dramatically. Now they're starting to inch back up again. The question is, you know, what does the second half of the year look like? And ultimately, where's the market share? You know, I think it's going to be somewhere in the 7% to 8% range. And I'm not alone in that. So by definition, it means that the second half is going to be quite a bit stronger than the first half. And you're going to see automakers releasing new products during that time. So that's one. Another one is us successfully installing the 30 DC fast charging projects that we have in the pipeline. So we have a nice cadence of new sites coming online. We highlighted some of that in our comments. And we actually front-loaded a lot of projects, even prior to our capital raise. We green-lighted several projects such that we have them coming online in actually a pretty good flow this month, meaning April, and then May into June and throughout the year. So that's another one. And then a final one is simply, you know, market consolidation favoring Blink. And I've said this before, but right now I see, you know, we have many opportunities that come across our desk every single week right now for M&A. And, you know, we're not touching those right now. And a lot of those companies are not going to make it, and we think we're going to benefit from the consolidation that we've been talking about quarter after quarter and that no question is happening at the moment.

Appreciate that.

And you kind of just answered my follow-up here. But the next question was going to be about the competitive landscape as the EV market evolves here in the U.S. and what kind of opportunities that could present to you, you know, either in the form of M&A or market share gains.

Yeah, you know, I'll start. Michael may jump in on this too. But, you know, I've said in the past, I mean, I like M&A. I like it as – but it's got to be – You know, one of the things that we are not going to do at Blink is after all the work we've done is take our eye off the ball and do something that will jeopardize the operational leverage we've created. So, again, we've seen a lot of stuff come across our respective desks, but most of it is asset sales. And when you get into asset sales, the only way you're going to pick something up is if it's highly accretive to what we're doing. And anything that is not highly accretive, we're dismissing immediately. Anything that could potentially be accretive, you know, we're looking at here and there. But as of now, you know, we haven't seen anything that's really caught our eye. So, Michael, I don't know if you have anything to add.

Yeah, Mike, you know, one thing to add to what you said, what we created is an asset like last capital intense balance sheet that will help us with the execution of our plan as We see some of the competitors out there, they still live in the past, they still continue burning an amazing amount of money. In this environment, this is going to be very detrimental to their survival and detrimental to their business. That's one of the things that we took care of this year by going through the Lean Forward initiative and rolling out a completely different strategy. We open for small to many opportunities, but we also operationally focused on our plan and aim to deliver exactly what we plan.

I appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Thank you. Our final question today will be coming from Samir Joshi with HC Wainwright. Your line is live.

Hey, good afternoon, Michael. Congrats on the progress. This is good tightening of the belts. I know it could be hard, but congratulations on the execution on that front. Thank you, Samir. So you have touched on many of those things that I wanted to talk about. But if you are looking at 2026 and beyond, what are the areas of growth? Is it more of own and operate? Is it increasing the service revenues from installed base? Or as you just talked about some M&A, a problem that is on the back burner, but could that be coming to play in 2027 and beyond?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So, you know, one of the things we mentioned, and it was subtle in our comments, is rationalization of our network. And what does that mean? It means, you know, the days of the EV infrastructure business planting flags and, you know, build a charger and they will come are over. And what we are intently focused on is the production of our portfolio, the profitability of our portfolio, the unit economics. So we are looking at assets that are unproductive. Quite frankly, at this stage in the game, I don't care about how many chargers necessarily are connected to the network from a blank-owned standpoint. I want to know and I want to retain only the very best ones. So It's absolutely going to come from optimizing the sites that are proving themselves to be productive and profitable. It is about utilizing deep analytics that we have at our disposal now in order to accurately site DC fast charging sites. And then it is obviously opportunistically to take advantage of all of the product sales opportunities that present themselves through our distribution channels.

Understood. Sort of maybe a follow-up on the previous one. You did speak about the 30 sites with the 150 ports. Michael mentioned heavy investment in the installed base. What could make this 30 site number grow to, say, 40 or 50 sites? and, like, what are the sort of scouting activities that you're doing to find such locations that could yield you high service revenues?

Yeah, Michael, do you want to take the first part of that from the financial angle, and then I can answer the second?

Yeah, absolutely. So part of our race from here, if you remember, we talked about that the majority of the investment, the majority of the cash that we raise, was supposed to go to building a very strong, profitable DC fast charging network. And we already had the backlog that I know Mike will talk about. So from a perspective of execution, we really needed the capital. And as Mike already earlier said today, we started with front load at that. We already started activities of procuring, of constructing, because we were confident in our capital raise efforts. Mike, back to you because I know you want to talk about the backlog and the delivery.

Yeah, yeah. So a couple things. One is, you know, we have somewhere in the neighborhood, Samir, of a $100 million backlog of projects that we could install if we had the capital. So then, you know, the next question is, well, what are you going to do to get the capital? As we mentioned time and again, the company has no debt. it gives us flexibility. But what we want to make sure of is that any debt that we incur is not debt for the sake of, but it can be serviced by the cash flows of the projects that we put in the ground. So we need to prove that out to financial partners in order to get a quantum that is not just what you mentioned, Samir. Actually, our ambitions are quite beyond that. So, you know, we have to prove out the unit economics. How do we prove out the unit economics? We put chargers in the right sites. How do we select the right sites? We look at metro areas, and what we're interested in is density. We want to participate in dense metro areas, both urban and suburban, that have high EV sales penetration, that have with existing charger footprints that are in that market are demonstrating high utilization and that have gaps in the geography. And then we're going after those gaps. So I'm not going to name specific markets because I don't want to disclose that, but we have multiple metros throughout the U.S. that we're targeting, and we're going to go after putting sites there.

Understood. Perfectly and good answer. Just one last one and sort of it is cash flow management or working capital management. The inventory you're targeting at around 15 million and that's I'm expecting that is for sales, right? That is for product sales. For sales. Thanks. Good luck for 2026.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of our question and answer session, so I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Vitaly Stalia for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for joining on the phone or online. If there are any additional questions, feel free to drop us a note at IR at BlinkCharging.com, and we look forward to interacting with you in the future. This is the end of the call.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.