Electrovaya Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Electra VIA Q4 and year-end 2023 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. 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. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, John Gibson, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thank you, Holly. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining today's call to discuss ElectroVaya's Q4 2023 and fiscal year-end results. Today's call has been hosted by Dr. Raj Dasgupta, CEO of ElectroVaya, and myself, John Gibson, CFO. Today, Electroviat issued a press release concerning its business highlights and financial results for the 12-month period ended September 30th, 2023. If you'd like a copy of the release, you can access it on our website. If you want to view our financial statements and management discussion analysis, you can access those documents on the new CEDARplus website at www.cedarplus.ca or on the SEC's EDGAR website at sec.gov forward slash EDGAR. As with previous calls, our comments today are subject to the normal provisions relating to forward-looking information. We will provide information relating to our current views regarding market trends, including the size and potential for growth, and our competitive position within our target markets. Although we believe that expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, they do obviously involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Additional information about factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking expectations may be found in the company's press release announcing the Q4 and full year fiscal 2023 results and the most recent annual information form and management discussion and analysis under risk and uncertainties, as well as in other public disclosures filed with the Canadian and US security regulatory authorities. Also, please note that all the numbers discussed on the call are in US dollars unless otherwise noted. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Raj.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our fiscal year-end call. I'd like to extend our apologies for the late filing this year. John, our financial controller, our auditors, and myself have worked tirelessly over the last few weeks, but given the unforeseen complexity, the process has taken longer than we hoped. John will go over it in more detail. However, we are very pleased with where the business is today and more importantly, our forward trajectory. We just reported the strongest fiscal year in our history. Our financial results for the year are impressive with record revenue growth of 170% over the last fiscal year and more than $3.2 million in adjusted EBITDA. We have clearly passed an inflection point. Our accomplishments demonstrate our continued commitment to execution and profitable growth. I'd like to reflect on a few of the key milestones we achieved over the year and our vision going forward. First, we delivered a strong fourth quarter, despite headwinds including a three-week port strike, which resulted in higher expedite fees and higher transportation costs. While this affected our gross margins for the quarter, I'm confident we will deliver incremental improvements to margins for fiscal 2024 and beyond. The pace of production, optimization of our supply chains, and the strength of our products and backlog have positioned the company for continued growth and a strong fiscal 2024. Increased sales of battery systems for material handling applications especially at large corporations, derive the majority of our revenue. Over the last year, we consistently drove revenue and order growth, and our backlog is at the highest level in our history and includes a diversified base of large Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 end customers. Second, in November, we announced a new three-year strategic supply agreement with Raymond Corp., and a related entity of similar or larger size that we believe will support our continued success in the material handling sector. Together, these OEMs control more than 50% of the North American market for Class I to III material handling equipment. As this industry continues to evolve, I believe the strong OEM relationships will be central to our long-term success. While most battery systems that we've produced to date have had drop in design with digital integration, we believe that the longer term trend will be for fully integrated battery systems. We are already working on numerous projects of this nature. The material handling sector will continue to represent a high growth, high margin business for the company. With respect to electrified class one through three segments, we estimate that our penetration with our first OEM partner is under 10%. Market indications for the lithium ion penetration rate suggest that this will increase to approximately 50% by 2027, about five times our current production rate. Our latest OEM partner also ships significant numbers of electrified Class I through III vehicles, which we are beginning to see growing opportunities for. Importantly, this OEM has a significant number of internal combustion engine powered vehicles for which there are legislative pressures to electrify. I'm optimistic that Electrovia's batteries are going to be a meaningful component of this electrification strategy. Electrovia continues to make a strong push into other verticals with heavy duty profiles. This includes electric bus, truck, mining vehicles, and energy storage, which all require high-voltage systems. We are broadening our market reach, including through the launch of our Infinity high-voltage product line. Since July 20th, when we announced the line, which takes advantage of our core strengths of safety and cycle life, we've had considerable interest and have just shipped our first product to a global aerospace and defense corporation. We have also received additional orders for these products for diesel replacement systems. More importantly, we are in late-stage negotiations with a well-established multinational bus manufacturer for an electrified transit bus with a planned start of production in late 2025. This contract, should we get it, could potentially have similar revenue profile as our current OEM customers in the material handling sector and would represent a major win for the company. Recently, we also established a relationship with one of the four largest Japanese trading houses. Through this partnership, Electrovaya products are being marketed to a host of Japanese and international OEMs, representing a significant boost to our sales reach. Our team at Electrobio continues to make steady progress with respect to our solid state battery program. We are producing our own proprietary ceramic material that has been shown to have very high ionic conductivity, perhaps higher than any similar materials in the literature. We are also developing an innovative separator that takes into account the internally developed ceramic materials. While it is still too early to determine whether these advances will lead to a commercially viable product, we are pleased with the progress achieved to date and will continue investing in it. Our manufacturing site in Ontario supports approximately $130 million worth in annual revenue. Despite this, we expect to require additional capacity by mid-2025. Furthermore, we are making progress in closing a facility to finance capital investments for our Jamestown facility. It does get a bit more complicated due to separate working capital facilities in Canada, and we expect refinancing the Canadian side to occur at a similar time. Despite this, we believe we are still on schedule for start of cell making operations in mid-2025. Our team has visited our selected equipment suppliers completed engineering studies, and hired several key personnel. That said, we will pursue large-scale investments only in the event that we close the debt facility, which needs to include advantageous terms with minimal impacts to operating cash flow and equity dilution. If we are unable to secure such financing, we expect that there will be limited financial impact as investments made to date are primary land and building, which can be sold at a profit. That said, I firmly believe that this funding and expansion will happen and benefit the company tremendously. With that, I would like to pass the call to John Gibson, who will go into the financial results in more detail.