Canoo Inc.

Greetings, and welcome to the Canoe's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Kamal Hamid. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Welcome to Canoe's second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. My name is Kamal Hamid, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations at Canoe. Today, I have with me our investor, chairman, and CEO, Tony Aquila, our new president, Josette Sheeran, interim CFO, Renato Giger, and newly promoted SVP Finance and Chief Accounting Officer, Ramesh Murthy. Tony will provide an update on the progress we have made since our last call on the topics we report on every quarter, and Josette will provide a glimpse into her mandate. Renato and Ramesh will then go over our second quarter financial results and turn it back to Tony, who will then provide closing remarks. We'll then open the call up for questions. Before passing it over to Tony, I'd like to provide a recap on our recent Investor Relations Day, which took place on June 17th. just two weeks before the end of the quarter. We had more than 800 online and in-person participants. The day provided a first glimpse of the canoe ecosystem. In-person attendees participated in vehicle test rides and got to speak with our team leaders across the business. Attendees also learned more about our technology and engineering and were able to see all of our vehicles in person. For those of you who may have missed the IR Day event, I encourage you to watch the replay which is currently available on our website and on YouTube. I've been in investor relations for more than 25 years and participated in many analyst days. The level of interest we saw in June, especially in a pandemic-impacted environment, was amazing and it reinforces that people are very interested in our product and that we are on the right track. Before I turn the call over to Tony, I'll take care of a housekeeping item and read our forward-looking statement. Please be advised we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. These are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and on our most recent Form 10-Q and 10-K and reports that we may file on Form 8-K with the SEC. All of our statements are made as of today, August 16, 2021, and are based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find the reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in today's earnings release, which can be found on the IR section of our website. With that, let me turn the call over to Tony.

Thank you, Kamal. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Before going further, I want to thank the canoe team for their hard work and dedication, especially during the resurgence of the pandemic. As to the effects of the pandemic, we continue operating with a conservative stance. Early on, we adjusted our projections because we believe in under-promising and over-delivering. We've pushed back the full return to office at our Torrance facility where we are complying with ongoing county restrictions on in-person work. We continue to operate remotely with limited on-site presence in Torrance. That said, the geographical diversification of our workforce that we announced in our prior call has allowed us to maintain in-person operations at different levels and at different locations. We have also limited non-essential travel. Further, the industry as a whole has been impacted by supply chain disruptions for material shortages or vendor delays. Chip shortages have been one clear example of this disruption. But we have reduced risk and alleviated impact to our SOP. We have previously consolidated our electrical architecture into a narrow set of controllers using fewer chips. Less parts overall means we believe we are less exposed to global supply chain disruptions. Overall, our sourcing team is in close communications with suppliers to address potential bottlenecks as we continue to make the precautionary adjustments and create mitigation strategies to ensure we're on track to reach SOP in Q4 of 2022. To put it into context, we now have 40 people in supply chain procurement with decades of experience, which support our drive to delivering on SOP in Q4. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated to any material changes. Before I update you on the quarter, I would like to highlight some of the key global developments that are accelerating the shift towards electrification and will benefit our strategy of EVs for everyone, democratizing access to productivity for hardworking families. The U.S. Infrastructure Spending Bill, which passed in the U.S. Senate, will allocate $73 billion to power grid improvements and $7.5 billion to EV infrastructures. Recently, the European Commission proposed requirements for a 55% decrease in new car CO2 emissions by 2030 and 100% decrease by 2035. The proposal also included mandates for ESG reporting requirements. In effect, this means that more than 13 million vehicles sold annually in Europe alone will need to transition from internal combustion to zero emissions by 2035. On July 29th, Congress introduced a tax rebate of $2,500 for the purchase of used electric cars. President Biden's August 5th executive order aims to make 50% of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in 2030 zero emissions. This would impact more than 10 million vehicles sold annually in the U.S. We applaud Congress and the Biden administration's rollout of domestic policies to support the EV economy. American innovation is helping lead the world to a zero-carbon future. We need and look forward to continued support from Congress and the White House. We are clearly at an inflection point as governments accelerate efforts to establish carbon-neutral targets. Now I'd like to introduce Josette Sharon. As many of you know, Josette brings a wealth of operational experience at a global scale. Over to you, Josette.