Microvast Holdings, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to MicroVast first quarter 2023 earnings call. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, investment community professionals have the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session. To join The question queue, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Monica Gould, Investor Relations for MicroVast. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you for joining us today. Joining me on today's call are Mr. Yang Wu, founder, chairman, president, and CEO, Sasha Keltoborn, chief revenue officer, and Craig Webster, chief financial officer. Ahead of this call, MicroVast issued its first quarter 2023 earnings press release, which can be found on the investor relations section of the company's website at ir.microvast.com. In addition, we have posted a slide presentation to accompany management's prepared remarks. As a reminder, please note that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and reflect our views only as of today. They should not be relied upon as representative of views as of any subsequent date, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these solar-looking statements in light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our financial results, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, filed on March 16, 2023, and the 10Q filed earlier today. In addition, during today's call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted gross profit, adjusted net loss, and adjusted EBITDA, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of micro-VAS performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, GAAP results. These non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to their most comparable GAAP metric in the tables included at the end of our press release. A webcast replay of this call will also be available on the investor relations section of our company website. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Yang Wu for opening remarks.

Thank you, Monica, and thank you all for joining us today. I'd like to start off with a high-level overview of the quarter. before providing some operational highlights. I will then turn the call over to Sasha Catabon, our Chief Revenue Officer, who will discuss some of our key wins in the quarter, followed by Craig Webster, our Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss our financials in more detail. I will then address our outlook for Q2 and the full year 2023 before opening the call up to your questions. Everyone, please turn to slide four as I cover a few highlights from the first quarter. We posted 28.1% revenue growth in Q1 2023, delivering revenue of 47 million. This exceeded our expectations as our European commercial vehicle customers began initial production and the supply chain issues began to abate. We achieved a double-digit close margin with a more than 8 percentage point year-over-year increase. We ended the first quarter with a record backlog of 486.7 million, driving by a healthy order intake of 62.7 million, led by significant ramp in sales to European customers. Our most significant achievement in Q1 was the completion of our phase 3.1 expansion in Huzhou, China, which started the trial production of the 53.5 amp hour cell. We continue to increase our production rate in line with delivery schedules provided by our customers, especially in the US and Europe. We estimate that this initial 2 GWh of cell module and pack capacity gives us an incremental 500 million in revenue potential, as you can see from our backlog numbers. There is already significant customer demand for our new product, and over 50% of the full-year capacity at Huzhou is already contracted. We expect customer orders and deliveries to get increasingly strong as the year progresses. And for that to be broad-based across the U.S., Europe, China, and Asia Pacific regions. With the Huzhou expansion now completed, our remaining capacity expansion plans for the year are centered on our new U.S. facility in Crossville, Tennessee. This will initially have an annual capacity of a two gigawatt hour. It is in full construction mode with startup production targeted for Q4 of this year. We would also like to provide a quick update on the Mexico ESS Container Assembly Hub. We mentioned our Q4 22 earnings call. We have listed a new facility in Mexicali, which is very close to the U.S. border, and we are currently working on installing a container assembly line. We expect to ship finished 4.3 megawatt-hour containers directly from our Mexicali facility starting in Q3 to customer project sites in the U.S., with many of those being located in the southwest sunbelt. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Revenue Officer, Sacha Calabon, who will discuss some of our key wins and achievements in the quarter.