Helbiz, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the LBIS second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. As a reminder, today's program will be recorded. If anyone objects, please disconnect now. I'd like to introduce your host for today's call, Gary Dvorak, Managing Director with the Blue Shirt Group, Mr. Dvorak Steve Orciak, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Hellbiz's second quarter 2022 results conference call. With us today are Founder and Chief Executive Officer Salvatore Pallela and Chief Financial Officer Giulio Profumo. We issued our financial results press release today after the market closed. It's available via news wires and on our website at investors.hellbiz.com. A replay of this conference call will be available later today on the Investor Relations page of our website. Please note that our press release and this conference call contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors. Hellbiz can give no assurance that these statements will prove to be correct. We have no obligation to update these statements. I will now turn the call over to Salvatore to begin.

Thank you, Gary, and good day, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call to review our business performance and financial results for the second quarter of 2022. I will provide a business update before turning the call over to Giulio for the financials. To start off, I want to make you all aware that we have focused our whole team from top to bottom to drive healthy profitable operations as quickly as possible. We spent a lot of effort and money over the past year building our infrastructure. We introduced many attractive products and services and in general prepared for explosive growth. These require large investments, which you have seen in our operation expenses and capital spending. With this foundation in place, now is the time to convert our investment into profit. We directed our team to shift their mindset to cost effectiveness, efficient use of capital, and a bottom line focus. Our immediate goal is to drive margin, expansion, show operating leverage, conserve cash, and invest smartly and effectively. In the second quarter, we saw initial sign of success. In our core mobility segment, cost of readiness declined 70% versus last year. We believe we can continue to scale mobility by growing revenue rapidly and expanding growth margin while controlling operating expenses. These will be primary goals upon which every employee of Elbit will be judged, starting from me. Our focus on cost of margin does not degrade from our effort to drive growth. In that regard, performance in the second quarter was quite solid. Revenue of $4.4 million was up 46% year over year and 32% compared to the first quarter. Revenue growth was driving both by increasing license and riding in our core micro-mobility business and by our entry into media and food delivery last year. As our core business, mobility saw solid growth in the key measure of quarterly activity platform user and trip. The growth reflects rebounding travel and important season factor, the rise of the warm weather. Our team is doing a remarkable job of navigating a complex regulatory environment. We are working closely with city officers to ensure that we provide a safe, reliable service. As of June 30, 2022, we hold 50 licenses in 38 cities in both the US and Europe. To sustain this high piece of expansion, we have built our fleet and operating teams. In Tampa, Florida, we were selected as a new vendor to replace an existing operator. Expanding in Flint, Michigan, and Miami Lake, Florida are on plan. We also received an expansion for our license in Washington, D.C., and continue to be the only operator in Miami. Looking abroad, we recently expanded our global presence into Australia. We are partnering with Logan, City Council of Queensland. Australia to initiate Creel operations. We are also starting a program with Alloggio, a leading local holiday rental operator, to offer our scooter to their guests. In Italy, we are partnering with Universal Pictures to acquire local riders with a final activation with the new Minions movie. Even with the near-term goal of scaling the profitability operation, we are not ignoring the massive long-term support community We signed a letter of intent to acquire Wheels, another leading micro-mobility company in the U.S., and the diligence is underway. We will update the market as it progresses. Also, looking long-term, just last week, we introduced Taxi Hiring to our app. This service enables our mobility offering to our customers. For example, it enables them to utilize habits even in bedwells. The opportunity here is an order of magnitude greater than scooter alone, and it's capital life, since it does not require us to invest in vehicles. You will hear more about this as a new product as we roll out in the coming months. On our technology front, we are investing to future develop safety technologies. In early July, we introduced HelmetChecker, our self-developing real-time helmet verification function. Helmet checker is part of the Helbit app, of course, but also can be licensed by others in our industry. As an industry leader, we are motivated to promote safe riding of all micromobility vehicles. Finally, to found growth, we are building our liquidity. In July and August, we complete a $5 million financing that is part of a planned green bond issue that could be up to 50 million. Our bonds are considered green and can tap a wider pool of investors. Due to this sustainability initiative that we launched last December, those guidelines reflect year of commitment to ESG science inception. Now, let me turn the call over to our CFO, Giulio Profumo, to discuss our financial performance for the second quarter. Giulio?

Thank you, Salvatore. Our detailed financials can be found in our earnings release and 10 Q5 links. So, we will concentrate on discussing the drivers of financial performance. Keep in mind that all figures given are for the second quarter of 2022. and all comparisons are with the second quarter of 2021, unless I note otherwise. We delivered another strong quarter and a solid financial performance, despite continued headwinds from industry, supply chain issues, and inflationary cost pressures. Both year-over-years and sequential revenue growth was an all-time high in Q2, with strong growth in mobility operating metrics. Revenue of $4.4 million was up 46% from one year ago and 32% sequentially. Mobility continued to show improvement with strong top-line growth, contributing 62% of total revenue, growing 72% sequentially due to the growing fleet size and growing awareness, coupled with the strong utilization due to the seasonal factor of warmer weather. Revenue is still dominated by paper rides, but subscriptions are gaining traction. Overall, the continued strengthening of the U.S. dollar had an unfavorable impact on revenue. In cost and currency, mobility revenue would have been 8% higher in Q2 2022 than what we reported. Across regions, strong mobility revenue was driven by solid performance in the key metrics that measures usage. Quarterly active platform users were up 90% sequentially and up 47% year over year. The number of trips were up 71% sequentially and 6% yearly. Looking at the other lines of business, media continues to be an engine of growth, contributing 34% of total revenue. Most media revenue came from commercialization of media rights. and Helbit's live subscriptions. We're building momentum in live subscriptions through the Helbit Unlimited offering. Helbit's kitchen revenue nearly doubled sequentially as we continue to build awareness of this service in our initial test market of Milano in Italy. Turning to the costs and expenses, I want to reiterate Salvatore's comment that Helbit is now 100% focused on getting to profitable operations. All costs and expenses are subject to review. We will continue to invest in growth, but we are doing it more effectively and efficiently. The first area of success is mobility cost of revenue, which decreased by 17%. We are constantly looking for places to automate our operations so that we can increase efficiency, customer service, while decreasing costs. This allows us to quickly identify inventory to move the popular spots of vehicles which may need a battery change. Meanwhile, total operating expenses doubled versus last year, reflecting our rapid growth. Overall cost of revenue was 69% higher, mainly due to the content licensing expenses in media, offsetting the improvements in mobility. Going forward, look for much more subdued OPEX growth, as we focus on leveraging the infrastructure we have built over the past year. Digging into operating expenses for the quarter, R&D expense growth represents investment in our in-house engineering team to further optimize our operating systems and customer-facing apps. Sales and marketing expenses grew from last year, demonstrating our commitment to advertising, promotional, and business development. especially after the launch of media and food delivery offerings. We incurred $1 million in non-cash stock-based compensation expenses, which accounted for almost 5% of the total operating expenses. Turning to our balance sheet and liquidity, at the end of Q2, cash and equivalents were $2.5 million. During Q2, we used cash to invest in growth. in particular the purchase of new electric vehicles to expand the operating fleet in several new cities. Keep in mind that our capital allocation approach is to prioritize investments in attractive markets where we are positioned to grow. We focus on initiatives that strengthen our platform, geographic footprint, and customer reach, which in turn lowers our customer acquisition costs, increases the lifetime value of our customers. Our growth goals are aggressive, so naturally we're focused on maintaining a healthy level of funding. In April, we secured $10 million of capital via two convertible notes, and in July we completed a $2 million financing through an issuance of a note and further raised an additional $3 million via convertible notes. With increased liquidity, we remain confident with our ability to fund the business and pursue our objectives. We're always exploring cost-efficient forms of capital to fund the business and opportunities to further optimize our capital structure. Looking ahead, we expect third quarter revenue to be up sequentially as we benefit from the higher fleet utilization due to the seasonal factor of warmer weather. For the full year 2022, we reiterate our expectation for revenue to double. We're solidly on track to achieve this goal. Now let me turn the call to Salvatore for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Giulio. Q2 was a pivotal quarter for Albitz. We intensify our focus on operating profitability, putting every cost under the microscope to ensure that we are driving profitability operations. Revenue grew substantially and we expanded our operating footprint. With more license in the U.S. and our fleet size grew as we deploy new vehicles. We also started licensing our helmet compliance technology, creating a completely new revenue opportunity. Most importantly, we are building the foundation to capture the massive long-term growth opportunity in front of us. We also just announced the Helbis Taxi, a taxi hailing service within our app that expands our mobility offering in a high-value capital lightweight. When we look to the future, we have never been more excited about what we can accomplish in the month ahead. We thank you for your interest and support and look forward to reporting our progress to you again in the months ahead. Now I will turn the call back to Gary to wrap up. Gary?

Thank you all for joining the call. If you have any follow-up questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by email or phone shown at the bottom of our press release. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.