Electric Last Mile Solutions, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Electric Last Mile Solutions second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask a question. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then Q. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Eric Grossman, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Electric Last Mile Solutions second quarter 2021 earnings call. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that remarks made on today's call may include forward-looking statements. These are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. For a more detailed discussion of the factors that may affect the company's results, please refer to our earnings release for this quarter and to our most recent SEC filings. Joining me on the call today are James Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Elms, Jason Law, co-founder and executive chairman, Albert Lee, BFO, and Rob Song, Deputy CFO and Treasurer. Management will make some prepared remarks, and then we will open the line for your questions. Now I'll turn the call over to James.

Thank you, Eric, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We had a momentous second quarter in which we made great strides in our mission to redefine productivity for our customers with intelligent e-mobility workstations designed for the last mile. In short, we completed our business combination with Forum Merger III Corporation and became the first publicly-listed EV company focused exclusively on the Class 1-3 commercial segment, which we call the Last Mile segment. We acquired our EV manufacturing plant, and our engineering program is on track. Demand continues to be strong, and we are now actively working with customers to finalize their order commitments. and we are affirming our plan for SOP of the urban delivery by the end of the third quarter this year. This keeps us on track to be a first mover in the Class 1 commercial EV space. And this is our first earnings call. I'll begin with some company background, then provide details on our business updates and outlook, and lastly turn things over to Albert to discuss our second quarter financials and outlook. At elms we saw the opportunity to serve the underserved the businesses of this country from trades to fortune 500 fleets who have lacked the proper sustainable and intelligent productivity solutions solutions that are profit drivers not cost centers and we identified a white space the class one commercial ev segment. And we expect the benefit from several major tailwinds first. is the enormous demand for commercial vehicle solutions, driven in large part by the exponential rise of e-commerce. Then there is the green tidal wave led by both companies seeking to meet aggressive ESG targets and the government, which is pushing and in many cases mandating the adoption of sustainable solutions such as commercial EVs and working to expand available funding and tax credits. There are a few, if any, commercial EV options on the market today to meet that demand. Here lies our opportunity. There are many new entrants and existing players who have announced commercial EV products, but we believe those deliveries are, in general, some time away. Elms is coming in the very near future, and we plan to ramp to mass production levels. and we will start in the Class 1 segment where we expect to be a first mover and then expand into the Class 3 segment as another early EV entrant. Our key differentiator and enabler is our unique business model. By leveraging existing and market-proven components, we can quickly get to market with reliable products at an exceptional speed by industry standards. The use of an EV-ready facility and market proven components dramatically reduces our costs and allows us to provide what we believe will be one of the lowest total costs of ownerships. And as a solutions provider, we're not just delivering the hardware, but also customization and digital solutions that will enable our customers to do more. And our products, the urban delivery and urban utility are segment defining. We expect both to offer at or near acquisition pricing, including federal incentives, versus competing ICE vehicles, as well as more cargo volume, which to our customers is far more important than weight. And we're excited to be making these EVs here in the U.S. and help make this country the center of EV design and manufacturing. With that intro, let me now give you an update on our business activities to date and our outlook for the rest of the year. In June, we completed our business combination with Forum, which resulted in a total capital raise of $294 million, more than sufficient funds to execute our business plan. We also acquired our fully capable EV factory in Mishawaka, Indiana, and are rapidly progressing towards production readiness. We enhanced our global organizational capabilities by expanding the leadership team with key personnel across digital solutions, engineering, operations, finance, and sales and marketing. Recent additions include Chief Strategy and Digital Officer Jonathan Ballin, VP of Engineering Praveen Cherian, and Adam Du, Director of China Operations, Deputy CFO and Treasurer Rob Song, Chief Revenue Officer Ron Feldeisen. To further advance our global engineering operations and to access talent and global suppliers, we have plans in place to expand our office locations to include Shanghai and San Francisco. On the customer front, we announced earlier this year that we have received more than 45,000 pre-orders for just the urban delivery, and we're very excited to announce that we are working with customers and our distributor partners to finalize order commitments with targeted end customers, including FedEx independent contractors, Amazon delivery service partners, on-demand cargo van rental companies, universities, HVAC companies, and many others. Our customer engagement is simultaneously continuing at a rapid pace with more than 35 scheduled trials for potential customers across verticals Again, spanning parcel delivery, telecoms, home improvement, vehicle rental, ports, and so on. We're also directly engaged in discussions with numerous fleet management companies. These are an important go-to-market channel in the commercial vehicle industry. The top 10 U.S. FMCs, as they're called, alone oversee more than 1.9 million vehicles. One example of these engagements includes Merchant's Fleet, the nation's fastest-growing FMC, and a leading driver of fleet electrification. As part of its Electrify Fleet initiative, Virchens Fleet has announced a commitment to have 50% of its mobility fleet electric by 2025 and 50% of its managed clients' fleets electric by 2030. We also announced a partnership with Trane Technologies' Thermo King unit, the global leader in transport refrigeration to build a first of its kind all electric refrigerated delivery vehicle prototype to demo with customers. This highlights our capabilities to deliver upfitted solutions across a number of industry verticals. In this case, the delivery of perishables from food and beverage to vaccines while providing customers with green products that will drive them towards their sustainability targets. This is really a great application for our product. If you think about the current gas and diesel refrigerated vehicles out there today, they're constantly idling, wasting energy, and spewing pollutants. And this is the kind of product that shows how we can make the entire supply chain cleaner, more sustainable, and at a lower total cost of ownership. This is just one example of the end use cases and verticals we can touch We'll provide more details as we finalize our arrangements with other targeted upfitting partners. Importantly, we'll shortly be initiating customer pilots with our second vehicle, the Urban Utility, our all-electric Class III medium-duty truck. As with our urban delivery, we believe the Urban Utility will be very competitive across both price and cargo volume versus both existing ICE competitors and new EV entrants in the segment. Customer demand for the urban utility has been incredibly strong, and companies are eager to have our demo vehicles in hand. At that point, we will begin to take reservations. On the back of the urban delivery, we believe the launch of the urban utility will provide Elms a strong portfolio position across the Class 1-3 last mile segment. We don't see any other OEMs getting the kind of EV foothold as quickly as we anticipate entering the market. We've also announced a strategic distribution partnership with Randy Marion Automotive Group, one of the largest commercial automotive retailers in the country. We feel very good about this partnership, which unlocks another important and high-volume go-to-market channel. We now have an order commitment from Randy Marion Automotive Group representing nearly $200 million over the next 12 months. And to support our customers and maximize uptime, we're putting in place a service ecosystem to offer complete coverage and deliver service in the most efficient manner possible. We plan to use Elm's Air fleet monitoring system, which will include over-the-air update capabilities, as well as incorporate all of the dealer service partners as well. In May, we also announced a service collaboration with Cox Automotive to give our customers access to Cox's end-to-end fleet service, including 6,000 service locations, 3,000 partner locations, and Dickinson Fleet Services Network of more than 800 mobile technicians. Our partnerships with Randy Marion Automotive Group and Cox Automotive are specific examples of how our ecosystem approach enables speed to market and de-risks our launch with both distribution and service covered from the onset. What I'm not doing is going dealer to dealer and trying to build my service network up from scratch. When it comes to launch readiness, we've made great progress and are definitely accelerating efforts here where we can recover from the delay in the merger closing, as well as all of the other challenges that the industry experiencing. Most visibly, we acquired our EV ready manufacturing plant in Mishawaka, Indiana. This is a phenomenal plant, one I've had a long history with, that has proven itself flexible for quick ramp and launch of different vehicle platforms, from the Hummer H2 to the Mercedes vehicles. There are a couple other major benefits from this specific plant. First, the previous owners made significant investments in the facility to retrofit it for EV production. This means that we have limited retooling required for launch. In fact, less than $10 million, a fraction of what it would typically cost OEMs to retool a plant. This plant also has an estimated annual production capacity of 100,000 units, which supports our business case as a mass production EV OEM and equips us with the ability to satisfy the enormous demand we are seeing on the commercial EV front. We benefit also from an experience ready and highly motivated workforce, many who have actually previously worked at this plant and went through extensive EV launch training. In addition, we have strong support from the Indiana Economic Development Council, which has offered us up to $3 million in conditional tax credits and training grants. Our engineering activities have also advanced at a great rate, in part due to our business model that leverages many existing, validated, and market-proven components. While we are engaged in a number of standard OEM engineering activities, from software development to validation testing, we have a lot of focus on our vehicle integration and homologation efforts. We are on schedule to finalize our testing and meet U.S. regulatory requirements. Our IP portfolio continues to grow as well, and we recently filed, for instance, a patent for a proprietary Class 1 commercial EV frontal impact absorption design as part of Elm's proprietary EV crash protection system. We've tested the technology in this patent application in crash testing and the results were extremely positive. We're confident with our progress to date and are now proceeding with final confirmation testing for the body structure. We expect that to occur this month. I feel very positive about our supplier ecosystem to support our launch. Last week, we held our first summit with key strategic suppliers to align on their individual capabilities and launch readiness. This was also an opportunity to ensure that all communication channels are open as we approach startup production. As you're all aware, battery supply is a high-profile subject at a national level and in the total EV business. On that front, back in February, we announced that we secured a battery commitment from CATL, the largest global battery company. We also signed a binding supply agreement with Wuling Motors, a leading automotive manufacturer of electric cargo vans. This broadens our supply base for market-proven components, and we'll be working with Wuling as our primary supplier of body and chassis components for the launch of the urban delivery. Elms has been driving the overall vehicle design based on U.S. customer requirements, and engineering specifications. Finally, I'd like to discuss now our outlook through the end of the year. First, we're affirming our plan for SOP by the end of the third quarter for the urban delivery. We've also set our production schedule for 2021 with a target of 1,000 vehicles. We set this, we believe, in spite of the delay in the close of the merger, COVID-19 disruptions industry-wide supply chain challenges, and now what appears to be the biggest of all challenges, logistics. But we believe that this target was important to set for several reasons. First, we have such strong demand from customers that we need to get to market as quickly and as great a scale as possible in the near term. By hitting production this year, we see an opportunity to establish longstanding customer relationships that will separate ourselves from a crowded space full of new entrants who will not enter the market for some time, many for several years. Second, we need to align all our suppliers and partners and get their commitments, which we now have in place. Now, I want to remind everyone again that there are definitely challenges in front of us. I've just mentioned some of them, the delay in the deal close, COVID-19, part shortages, supply chain complications, logistic challenges and rising freight costs, increases in prices of raw materials, and so on. We are not alone in experiencing a shortage in containers and a four to five times price increase in container costs. We're doing our best to offset these, but these challenges are real. All of this is on top of the normal challenges that come with launching a vehicle and ramping production. We're fortunate that the ELMS team has a tremendous amount of experience launching many vehicles, so we're pushing ahead to reach our target of 1,000 units this year. To summarize, we believe we have all the pieces in place to launch this year and take advantage of a tremendous market opportunity. How often in life does a business come around that has white space, customer demand, business and government alignment, and solves an enormous environmental problem. I believe we are positioned to be a major contributor to the solution, not in several years, but starting this year. And even if we were to capture only a fraction of the total addressable market, just 5% by our estimates, that is enough demand for us to produce tens of thousands of vehicles annually. Our goal, of course, is to capture far more than a fraction And we believe that our launch this year and first mover advantage will provide us a solid footing to establish Elms as the leading provider of last mile solutions. We are at an inflection point in commercial EV adoption and Elms is positioning itself to capture that demand. We'll have more developments to share over the coming months as we approach our start of production. And I look forward to updating you on our progress. Now, I'll turn it over to Albert to go through our financials.

Thank you, Jim. We completed our business combination on June 25th. The transaction resulted in approximately $294 million of capital raised, sufficient to execute the business plan and achieve positive cash flow. As part of our business combination, we entered into an agreement to acquire our EV manufacturing plant in Mishawaka, Indiana, for a total of $145 million. At closing, we made an initial payment of $30 million, and the remainder will be paid in accordance to agreed schedule. Moving on to second quarter results, as of June the 30th, the company had a cash balance of $217 million. We also reported a net loss of $8.6 million, or a loss of 10 cents per share. We did not report any revenues, and we do not expect to have any revenues until our first urban delivery vehicles are produced and sold, which we expect to happen towards the end of third quarter this year. Operating expenses were $7.5 million, consisting of $2.4 million of research and development expenses in development services, testing, and prototype expenses. $5.1 million of G&A expenses for personnel, legal, consulting, and marketing expenses. For the full year 2021, total CapEx is expected to be in the range of $25 to $30 million. The bulk of this is expected to incur in the second half of the year. Our reduced investment level as compared to other EV companies is due to our efficient business model that leverages an EV-ready production plant and market-proven EV components. We also project our total operating expenses for 2021 to be in the range of $75 to $80 million. This concludes our prepared remarks. We now open the lines for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. We also ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Our first question today comes from Mike Schliske with DA Davidson.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. Can you hear me OK? Yes, Mike. All right, great. I wanted to ask about your production outlook and compare that to your sales outlook. I'm curious, do you expect to sell all that you produce this year? And can you give us a sense as to who the recipients of these production vehicles might be? Is it your larger distribution partners, or will some of these vehicles go direct to some of the fleet that might want to be ordering it direct?

Let me take the first one first. It's a short answer is yes. As you know, with the amount of demand we have, everything that we produce will go straight through one of the distribution channels we've lined up. And I'll come back to the second part of your question. And I'd say instantly arrive at the customers. So there'll be a straight through. We don't anticipate any inventory at our plant or any inventory at the distributors. To pick up on your second part, Mike, we We'll be selling those first vehicles through the various distribution channels. And as you highlighted, that would be, you know, for instance, our distributor, Randy Marion, but also the FMCs because they're part of that initial allocation for us to go through to them. And as you know, ultimately to the end customers, that would be the final users of those vehicles. So they'd be going through both those channels.

Okay, got it. And then for my follow-up, maybe I can ask about your readiness to produce this quarter. A little bit about just some of the confidence behind that. Have you actually finished all the crash testing and all the safety testing? Are you kind of ready to go, and now it's just time to get in the right people on board? Or are we still waiting for the final, final results before you can officially turn on the switch?

Let me kind of walk it back up again. From an overall plant readiness standpoint, we have to have, of course, several simultaneous things in place. So first is the product readiness. I'll come back to that. As we mentioned in my remarks, the supply chain readiness, and we have the suppliers in place that we need for the initiation of our starter production at the end of September. The plant readiness, of course, is key. In that regard, as you know, by our business model, we started with already a very ready plant, EV ready plant. And there was just a small amount of labor additions that were required at the plant to get us into a position to be able to manufacture the first. We've got, I talked to Brian this morning, about three quarters of those people hired already since the closing. And then obviously at the other end, customers, you know, waiting to receive those vehicles. So Of all of those, the one that you mentioned is in the product readiness itself. And as you're aware, we have different customer requirements and different channels that those vehicles will be heading to. So in the first launch, again, to control our risk and to make it a manageable launch, we have different customer expectations, let's say requirements, specifications needed. So in that first group of those, the full launch, Vehicle crash testing, as you call it, is not necessary. So we're in a position already with the specifications of the vehicle as they stand today to ship to them. And then as we complete our final verification and compliance testing, then we'll open up the second channel and also ship them and call it phase two later in the quarter.

Outstanding. I'll pass it along. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Steven Bolkman with Jefferies.

Hi, good morning, guys. Maybe just sort of starting with that. When, James, do you expect to pass those hurdles relative to certification that gets that second channel open to you? Is that a 2021 event or does that happen in 22?

I'll pass it, if you don't mind, Steve. Obviously, Jason's our Safety expert, so I'll let him go into some detail on that.

Yes, as I know, we have experienced, you know, Steve Rong, one of the largest safety companies, so I call myself a safety expert. So all the total age for the federal requirement, total 41 tests, 24 for the frontals, 14 for the site. So far, we've done numerous crash tests. In this month, we're going to have three vehicles, two in the U.S., one in China, to get crashed. which we call the confirmation test for the order structure integrity and also the safety measure we put into the place including the side protection, front protection, knee protection and also battery protection. So with that we finished and which so far, all indications showing very positive. And with that, we'll be, I call it a user-engineered term. We freeze engineering terms, and we're turning our, finish our crash pulse with county on the controller. Now I'm down to a little bit of detail now. With that, we'll be go over on the, our starting target by November for that.

So I think the short answer, Steve, is yes. 2021, not 2022. For sure.

Does that answer your question? As detailed as you can.

I appreciate the long answer, actually, James. For my follow-up, how should we think about, I guess I'm trying to figure out, if you guys ship 1,000 units this year, what should we be thinking about from a revenue perspective? What I'm really asking is Given the inflation that we've seen in various parts and also logistics, I think you called that out, James. Is there an opportunity for the unit pricing to be a little bit higher than it might have been absent all that inflation?

Yeah, let me work our way backwards. You're absolutely right. First off, as you know, with being first mover, nobody in the space And as we've originally marketed the price of our vehicles, to be honest, at $32,500, as you know, when we now are approaching the customers, move that to $34,500, there has not been any pushback. And so we're also looking, as you said, in even more opportunity for more upside. Of course, we've got the opposite, call it headwinds, that says on our cost side. That would address revenue, but on the cost side, of course, these – These transportation costs and the overall logistics systems have gone the other way on us. And so, you know, we need to balance those to come out to our net profitability. But I agree with you. Certainly there is an upside in our revenue.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Daniel Ives with Wedbush.

Thanks. Jason, could you... Can we just go through the timeline, just kind of on the last question? So safety seems like everything's tracking according to plan. So let's say, assuming that happens, I guess, like the November timeframe, could you then talk about that happens and then what the next step would be in terms of the plan in Indiana? And, yeah, James, maybe you could hit on that, kind of the one-two, how that would work.

Okay, so I can... you know, as we are trying to hit the market as quick as we can, right? So I just mentioned earlier about the next three vehicles, we lined up actually one test in China, one, two testing here, which so far, the previous testing indicated pretty positive. So we finalized our EcoStruxure engineering phase, as Jim mentioned earlier. With that, so we started to, in the next 60 days, we are going to finalize, as an engineer, to incorporate into the existing parts because we need some change. So we're going to make some change for the parts to reflect the testing results we conformed. and of course as we are install the airbags install the safety equipment going through that and we're going to have the you call the certification test which is uh as a as you know for the oem automotives guys you do it yourself for the safe itself certification which is a probably more like a november time frame with all the p-piped parts you go for that and in the meantime I will answer for Jim and we're ramping up the manufacturer of people inside the plants and give all the experience we have. I always say, make your mistake as early as possible. So this way you don't have to dealing with them when your volume go up, go much higher. So with that, we're ramping up probably sub 50 vehicles in the September. And the gradual increase to training labor, also supplier base, supply chain, and the quality manufacturer system, including softwares, including the MES, including training, including the delivery, everything, we go through the, I call it a multiple test. I call it a lunch plus 90 days, if I use the Detroit word, to make sure we make all the necessary mistakes and get our Because of the lower speed of the vehicle, the changes are much, much smaller. So allow us to get our total system trained. With that, as of November, we finalized everything for the true production going to this 40 certified vehicle. which that means we're going to be ramping up right to, I think, if I'm correct, 500, somewhere in that number, because this way, after 90 days, our whole system supply chain is ready. So we can hit from 500 up to around 1,500 right into the Q1. That's kind of what we're looking at. Does that answer your question?

No, that's great. That's great. And, Jim, maybe, like, just going on that, to the plant in Indiana. So, like, where in terms of, like, how many employees so far have been hired? Can you just talk about, like, the hiring plans between now and kind of full ramp as we go into where this year, early 22? Sure. Sure.

Well, just as you remember, Dan, with the plant that we had the stations laid out there, and again, to control our risk and to make this a manageable launch, when we initiate the first vehicles in September, we really just need six stations on the assembly line there. So again, it's a very low, let's say, labor requirement for us to be able to hire a team. So we'll be initiating the plant launch with about 35 people, and that includes both, of course, the salary as well as skilled trades, the support team, and the operators themselves. So when I talked to Brian earlier today, he was just three or four short of hitting that number. Brian's our plant manager. Yeah, sorry, you meant Brian. Yeah, for everybody else in the line, Brian Tam, our plant manager. And then as we went through, again, the fall, we'll grow that total number up 50 to 75 as we get into the higher rates of production that – Jason was mentioning, and then also we grow into, as you saw in the plant, about 17 stations that will receive 15 modules for the final assembly. So, again, on a relative basis compared to other launches and other assembly plants that might be getting in literally hundreds of modules and thousands of part numbers, this has been part of the plan from day one is part of our unique business plan to have a very, very, call it simple, on a relative basis, manufacturing launch.

That's awesome. Thanks.

Our next question comes from Greg Lewis with BTIG.

Yes, thank you, and good afternoon, good evening, everybody. You know, James or Jim, I know you spent too much time kind of detailing out the customer backlog. Any kind of color you can give on maybe how that is evolving, you know, now that it's, you know, now that I guess the merging for a month and vehicles are, you know, I imagine customer visits are starting. Yeah. right Greg you cut out lost you about halfway through that question I think I knew we were going but try it again yeah I was just more curious about I mean you know post the piece back and you know I imagine customer visits are to the facility or picking off you know more people are getting more access to the vehicle and

you know any kind of updated color you can give us a kind of around the backlog and and maybe you know potential uh okay well i think i got enough to answer your question that cut out again but i definitely can fill in all of that but you're absolutely right um as we talked earlier in the year It was tough for us to schedule the test drives. A lot of the companies, of course, had their own COVID restrictions as to accessibility to them. And that world has thankfully opened up somewhat. We've had to date a little over 30, 32 drive events at different locations for different customers. So that's picked up. We've got right now, as I said in my notes, over 30 test pending trials of people that confirm you know please bring it to my location let my drivers test it some of them for a day some for a week some for two weeks so we have those uh scheduled out in uh in several of the verticals also the telecom home improvement of course package delivery and things across those different areas and also some of the other use cases we talked about universities you know airports ports and things like that and so we'll be working through each of those as those pilots are able to occur, we're quite confident that then that's going to start falling through, let's say, the bottom half of the funnel very quickly. And I think to just build on that, we've been able, I think, now to start merging back in with what I'd call more of a standard industry practice as far as the way that we would interact with these potential customers and that they're used to a certain set of paperwork and commitments and trials and, of course, ultimately leading the purchase orders and releases. So we initiated this with the so-called pre-orders, but now we're merging down into, I'd say, a more standard normal process that other large volume OEMs are using and also what the industry is used to as well.

Okay. And then on the Thermo King announcement, realizing that the ink is still wet on that press release, any kind of color you can give us in terms of, you know, maybe what the list price of that vehicle is going to be. And then just as we think about, you know, maybe what that addressable market looks like, you know, realizing you probably did a lot of diligence as you thought about doing that partnership and moving that project forward.

Yeah, our first step is to take actually that unit itself that's been built up and we've got already, I forget the name of it, it's up in the northeast, some really large food trade show that's an annual show to show the vehicle and gauge consumer interest or customer interest. So until we get some of that early feedback, obviously Thermo King is very, very optimistic or they wouldn't have in fact invested to get the unit built. But once we come out of that, I think we'll have a much better read for the answer to your question.

Okay, great. And then just one more for me. Realizing that, you know, the initial 1,000 production for this year, you know, is kind of we're going to get these units off the line and into kind of the suite manager's hands and end users. And any kind of color how we should start thinking about, you know, I know part of the long-term plan is to start doing some of the upfitting, you know, at the Indiana facility. Any kind of progress there and then when we should think about Elm starting to actually do some of the upfitting at its facility?

Yeah, I'll give you a little color on a couple of fronts. On the one, I'd say sort of premeditatedly and a little bit selfish to simplify or launch some of these early orders that we've taken in have very, call it, light upfitting orders. makes you imagine with some of the package delivery, just some very basic shelving and not trying to complicate our manufacturing process to get these early units out, simplify our quality process and things like that, and then move into the more complicated upfitting in the first quarter. As far as the upfitters themselves, as you know, we've been working with several of them. Adrian is our lead candidate, let's call it, and we're in the process of finalizing that, but You know, they specialize in certain areas of upfitting, and we've also talked to several others that we're also in a stage of finalizing agreements with as well. So once we get those inked and completed, we'll also be able to share, I think, more on the outlook from both revenue as well as the ultimate cash that flows through our bottom line as well. So we'll be updating you soon on that.

Okay, perfect. Okay, thank you all for answering all my questions. Have a great night.

Our next question comes from Jeff Osborne with Salon & Co.

Yeah, good afternoon. A couple questions on my end, Jim. On the shipping cost, the logistics that you referenced, great to hear that you might be able to raise the price. Can you just give us a sense of – You and your SPAC merger deck had some helpful details as it relates to cost allocation between raw components, some from China, some domestic, et cetera. Shipping was in there. Should we simply just take what was in that SPAC merger deck and put a 3, 4x multiplier on it, or do you anticipate something below that? I'm just trying to get a sense of trajectory for gross margins for the initial units.

Yeah, I think three to four would be low for your model, but I'll pass it over to Albert. He gave you some more specific numbers, so we'll give you the right guidance.

Go ahead, Albert. Hi, Jeff. Nice talking to you again. The world is facing an unprecedented logistic challenge, and Jim mentioned container costs is four to five times higher than normal. And the fact is that a container used to cost $3,000 to $4,000, now over $20,000. And on top of that, the shipping time has increased significantly from 30 days to over 70 days. And they are very unpredictable. So as we disclosed earlier in prior filings, our gross margin was over 20%. But because of the very strong headwind on logistics, we're expecting the gross margin to be dropped to low single-digit. Now, we are pursuing many actions to mitigate the risk as well as recovering some of the margins. For example, we are pursuing contract rates. We are optimizing the shipping efficiency. We are evaluating creative ways in shipping strategies as well as Jim mentioned that we are pursuing pricing opportunities. So we're all working on that. So hopefully the results will be better than what we have on the books right now.

Well, we've got Jeff's short term is actually in our model reflecting the cost that we're seeing as we're seeing them. But we're also, of course, not baking those in long term. We see that somehow this industry is going to balance out. But I tell you, probably in the other people that you talk to in this industry, this, as Albert said, is beyond unprecedented and all my years of being in this business, we've never seen anything as crazy or dynamic as this. You know, we think we have a line of sight on some of these early units. For instance, we're just bringing in this week, you know, we call on Friday, and then like Monday, you know, they change their mind. The shipping time, the predictability of this entire system, even domestically here, is just like out of control. So as I said, we're crisis managers. That's what we do for a living in this business. So We're all seasoned guys that can do what we can do, but some of it is, frankly, a little bit out of our control right now. But over time, we've got a glide path back down to somewhat normal so that these short-term logistics costs aren't baked in permanently, obviously.

That makes sense. Appreciate the detailed response. And then my follow-up question was on the market for the vehicles that you'll be producing in September and October before that November certification. I saw the press release on Notre Dame, things like zoos, college campuses, people that are on private roads, slow speeds. Can you just articulate what you think the size of that market is? Is it anything that's in your backlog or hand raisers? And more importantly, You know, what percentage of that is the 1,000 units that you expect for the year in the event that there's a delay in the November certification? I'm just trying to get a sense of what can be achieved, you know, without that certification.

Yeah, I think we've been, to be honest, Jeffrey, very surprised how huge this market is because it's – not the mainstream markets it's not well documented or not much data that records this but as we just get into a few examples even just a few of these universities and so you know how big is your fleet and it turns out you know thousands it's it's quite remarkable and you multiply that by even just in the university vertical the number of universities gets up extremely high into six figures quickly then you go to the ports then you go to the airports and uh the leisure facilities, let's call them, and all of a sudden this thing has been mushrooming on us. So what we thought might be a limited market and might be a limited window of availability has turned out to be a completely parallel market stream for us to address. It's above the typical, I'd say, quality and features of the LSV markets that are there now with these sort of open off-road vehicles into something that's, of course, more capable like ours. So Yeah, we're thinking this market is in the hundreds of thousands.

That's great to hear. That's all I have. Thank you.

This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the call back over to James Taylor for any closing remarks.

All right. Well, we appreciate everybody that attended the call today. And we look forward to the next opportunity, the next window for us to talk to you either individually or as a group in our next broadcast. Thank you.

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