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spk01: Good morning, and welcome to the New V. Holding Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2022 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 questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Eduardo Roya's Managing Director, ICR. Please go ahead.
spk06: Thank you. On today's call are Gregory Poilon, Chief Executive Officer, and David Robson, Chief Financial Officer of Nuvi. Earlier today, Nuvi issued a press release announcing its fourth quarter and full year 2022 results. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call up for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements. While these forward-looking statements reflect Newby's best current judgment, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking projections. These risk factors are discussed in Newby's filings with the SEC and in the earnings release issued today, which are available on our website. Newby undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Gregory Pallon, Chief Executive Officer of Newby. Gregory?
spk05: Thank you, Eduardo, and hello to everybody joining us today. We thank you for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results call. The fourth quarter is a watershed moment for school bus electrification with the awarding of grant funding as part of the EPA's school bus program in October. As discussed at length on our November call, we were thrilled to find out in October that Nuvi facilitated 10 of its school district customers in receiving 61 EPA Clean School Bus rebates as part of the first phase of this five-year program. Over the past several months, we have been working closely with the school district partners for which we were the grant writers. along with other potential customers with application process we facilitated. Receiving grant or rebate money is just step one in the process of electrification. Recall that award recipients receive $20,000 in hardware and infrastructure rebate money per bus. This translates into $1.22 million in funding for new high-powered chargers, infrastructure, and site design associated with the 61 buses, but customers have flexibility in how they spend it. Nuvi's bidirectional chargers have sold for more than twice the rebate amounts. As such, some customers may choose to pay the difference to purchase the DC chargers, but more likely, we expect most to, one, seek more grant funding in addition to the APA funding, two, stack their EPA rebate so as to cover the full cost of DC chargers with more than one rebate per charger, or three, apply their funding for the purchase of AC chargers. Recall that DC chargers are more expensive than AC chargers. However, bidirectional DC chargers provide significant faster charging speeds, and more importantly, allow new V customers the opportunity to unlock valuable V2G revenues using a proprietary GIF platform over the life of the vehicle. We take a consultative approach with our customers and partners, helping them to think through their projects in strategic fashion, which includes intelligent integration of their fleets with the grid in order to help them understand how to maximize the value they get out of their government dollars. We're able to do this because Nuvi is not just a technology company. We're an experienced team executing time-tested and constantly applied process of deploying V2G-enabled infrastructure successfully across the world. With that said, we expect to receive the majority of the purchase orders for hardware associated with the EPA funding over the course of the second quarter and for shipments to then occur over subsequent quarters. As a reminder, the EPA Clean School Bus Program is planning to provide a total of $5 billion in funding by 2026. We expect to learn more in the coming weeks as applications are released for the 2023 phase in this program. We look forward to participating heavily in this round as well and hope to outperform our Phase 1 results. On the regulatory front, I want to update you on the regulatory tailwinds we continue to see for V2G as they underscore the critical role that V2G can and should play as vehicles electrify. California remains at the forefront of legislation to combat climate change and promote EV adoption, where more than 60% of the new vehicle sales were electric in 2022. Earlier this year, State Senator Nancy Skinner introduced California State Bill 233 in what is yet another climate bill, but one that is V2G focused. Specifically, the bill calls for the establishment of statewide vehicle grid integration goals, higher incentives for bidirectional capable electric vehicles and charging stations, and a requirement that all electric vehicles and charging stations be bidirectional capable by model year 2027. in order for AV drivers to be able to reduce their energy bills while improving grid stability and so helping to avoid power outage. While this legislation is still working its way through the stages, it must pass to become low. This is a significant new development representing unprecedented policy support for newbies' products and services and the recognition by policymakers of the importance of V2G as a reliability resource. Further, Newby will begin its second year of participation in California Emergency Load Reduction Program, or ELRP. Recall that in March 2021, the California Public Utility Commission, or CPUC, created the ELRP to pilot a new demand response approach to help avoid rotating outages typically seen in California's hot months. In short, ELRP pays electricity customers for reducing energy consumption or increasing electricity supply during periods of electrical grid emergency. The program is in effect daily from May to October in the late afternoon and early evening hours with a maximum annual dispatch limit of 60 hours. In the summer of 2022, we launched our participation in this program by pairing our V2G technology and service with San Diego Gas and Electric, or SDG&E. We kicked this off in San Diego in July at the Caron Valley Unified School District and expanded in October to the Ramona Unified School District. This past August, during an unprecedented 10-day streak that blew away over 1,000 heat records, this operation alone resulted in an export of about 1 megawatt-hour of energy to the grid, with impressive greenhouse gas reduction, or equivalent houses served matrix of about 250 kilograms and 500 kilograms, respectively. We look forward to being able to leverage the entire calendar of ELRP program availability this year. Nuvi will have over a megawatt of B2G resources participating in the 2023 ELRP season, by far the largest operator of B2G assets in California. Our North America sales and grant writing teams remain at the forefront of these developments, ensuring that we are building and threatening relationships with markets that have B2G programs such as ELRP in place or soon to launch. California, both through ELRP and other V2G opportunities, remain at the forefront, but we see similar opportunities in other major markets like New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Delaware, in addition to those programs which exist outside of North America, including Europe and Asia. Also in the electric school bus market, in February, Nuvia accepted a purchase order from the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, to sell 24 V2G-capable DC fast chargers with shipments in the first half of the year. In fact, 18 chargers have already been shipped during the first quarter of 2023. This is our largest single DC fast charger purchase order to date, and as with many programs, we believe that this represents just the tip of the iceberg with respect to eventual potential opportunity sets. This order aligns with LAUSD's 2022-2026 strategic plan to modernize infrastructure for operational effectiveness. The school district operates the second-largest school bus fleet in the country with 3,000 school buses. This is estimated to represent approximately 180 megawatts of electric school bus battery capacity if all 3,000 school buses of the LAUSD fleet are electrified, which we think is inevitable. Turning to other exciting updates at NuVis since our last call. On our third call, we discussed pursuing opportunities with third-party charging station OEMs, whereby we interface with a unidirectional infrastructure already in place to layer in our B2G platform. We view this as a means of accelerating the growth of grid services revenue in a way that is not reliant on us rolling out large-scale hardware and vehicles, and which is working capital light for us. After several months of discussion and negotiations, we were incredibly proud to disclose our partnership with Circle K in the Nordics in February. Circle K operates across 24 countries with approximately 14,800 stores offering roadside transportation fuel. Through our agreements, Nuvi's V1G unidirectional charging management and power capacity market participation technology is expected to manage an initial 40 megawatts of EV fast chargers at 50 of Circle K's service stations and three to five stationary storage sites in Norway and Denmark. We expect to begin to generate modest revenue in the second quarter and for a gradual ramp in the second half of the year. While hardware revenues remain the largest percentage of our revenue today and are likely to remain this way in the near term, we're increasingly excited about the faster growth trajectory of our recurring grid service revenue as I will elaborate in on a bit. After we complete our first phase of integration with Circle K, we would look to work with them to expand to additional locations across the Nordic high-speed charging network, which in Norway and Denmark is more than 160 stores strong, and eventually other countries and regions. We applaud Circle K for seeking ways to monetize its EV charging assets through market participation with system operators in Norway and Denmark. Further, we were happy to hear a few weeks ago that CushTard, the current company of Circle K, is expanding their portfolio in Europe to the proposed acquisition of a portfolio of retail assets owned by Kotal Energy that covered nearly 2,200 sites as of year-end of 2022. It seems to us that CushTard and Circle K are going all in on transforming service stations into full-fledged service hubs with EV charging, and that place poised to be a key part of this, and where leveraging V2G technology can, in our view, be a true differentiator. Our primary focus today is to ensure a smooth ramp-up of our operation with Circle K. Making sure all of the key pieces of the technology are talking to one another is critical, and so we want to make sure we are working closely with our colleagues to maximize are uptime so as to drive a successful program with Circle K and their customers. To give you an idea of the scale, with 10 charging stations per site and 250 kilowatts per charging station, a standard value today, across 17,000 stores owned today, this represents more than 40 gigawatts of capacity under management. We also remain in active discussion about additional opportunities similar to that one and we hope to be able to provide an update on this later this year. To conclude my opening remarks, I'd like to tie these various themes together and briefly revisit our remarks for last year as we summarize 2022 and take a high-level view of 2023. As we discussed in November, we have been disappointed with the pace of the inflection in our business and specifically the sluggish pace of electrification in the school bus market in the U.S. The combination of inflation, power shortage, and the reliance on subsidies make the timing of the school bus opportunities unpredictable. These can be reflected in our orders for DC fast chargers in 2022, which declined in the back half of 2022 compared to the significant growth we had in the first month of 2022. We do expect to see an improvement in 2023 ED bus sales, but both sales will likely still remain in the hundreds and not thousands this year. One thing we are very proud of, however, is our market share. We estimate that more than 20% of electric school buses are connected to Nuvi hardware. We believe this validates our technology is a step that we should not be taking lightly, and we are confident that we can grow our share even more. In the near-medium term, the sale of our EV charging hardware will continue to be the bigger revenue generator for our business. As such, we are thrilled to have received the record order from LAUSD. With Q1 2023 nearly over, we can confidently say that we expect to report record orders this quarter and more than any quarter in 2022 and 2021. We further expect another strong quarter in Q2 as the EPA program awards come in, which of course should provide a good baseline for shipments through the balance of the year. We expect to see a more material improvement in our hardware sales in 2023 as the tide begins to turn. At the same time, we discussed in the last poll how it was important to pursue opportunities such as the one we have secured with Circle K. The ability to significantly expand our megawatts under management and provide grid services is, of course, the endgame for Nuvi and where we provide truly differentiated values to our customers. Hardware is just step one. Partnering with companies that are deploying the infrastructure themselves is accelerating the growth of our megawatts under management and, more importantly, the growth in our grid service revenue. Through commercial opportunities such as the Circle K partnership and other similar agreements we are pursuing, we believe there is a possible pathway to significant growth in megawatts under management in 2023 and for a solid improvement in grid services. We remain hesitant to guide on grid service revenue as it can be very tough to predict, especially in these early days, but wanted to be sure we expressed our optimism around making some real gains in 2023. And with that, I will now turn the call over to David to discuss our financial results.
spk07: Thanks, Gregory. I will start with a recap of fourth quarter 2022 results. In the fourth quarter, we generated total revenues of $1.15 million in compared to $1.25 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. One half of the decline is driven by lower grant revenues, falling more than 50% year over year, and the balance of the decline is attributed to lower product and service revenues, which declined by 5%. Note that relative to the third quarter of 2022, sales more than doubled in the fourth quarter, and we have seen a continued revenue acceleration into Q1 of 2023. Margins on product and service revenues were 32.7% for the fourth quarter 2022 compared to 3% for the fourth quarter 2021. The strong improvement in margins on a year-over-year basis primarily reflects the decision in Q4 of 2021 to engage in the sale of DC chargers at a discount with a particular customer in return for the contractual rights for a larger share of future grid service revenues. In addition, margins also benefited this year from grid service revenues being a higher mix of total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared with the prior year quarter. Margins can be lumpy from quarter to quarter depending on mix. As a reminder, DC charger gross margins at standard pricing generally range from 20% to 25%, while AEC charger gross margins are approximately 50%. But in dollar terms are a smaller fraction of the revenue of a DC charger. Grid service revenue margins generally range between 30% to 40%. Operating cost, excluding cost of sales, was $9.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2022, compared to $8.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. The increase was primarily attributed to increases in professional fees, rent, and legal expenses, partially offset by a decrease in compensation expenses, including a reduction in share-based compensation. As Gregory discussed previously, in the second half of 2022, we implemented steps to reduce costs in order to maximize operating efficiencies and liquidity. As such, cash operating expenses, excluding cost of sales, stock compensation, and depreciation and amortization was $7.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, declining from $7.8 million in the third quarter. We expect additional declines and efficiencies in future quarters with such expenses running at approximately $7 million or lower for the first quarter of 2023. Other income was $1 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 versus an expense of $1 million in the year-ago quarter. The $2 million increase in other income is primarily due to the change in the fair value of warrants issued to Stone Peak in evolved transition infrastructure related to the formation of LIVO in 2021 and the change in the fair value of warrant issued to an accredited investor during the third quarter of 2022 associated with the securities purchase agreement. Net loss attributable to Nuvi common stockholders decreased in the fourth quarter of 2022 by 1.6 million to 7.9 million from a net loss of 9.5 million in the prior year. The decrease in net loss is primarily due to an increase in other income. Turning to our full year results. For the full year 2022, we generated total revenues of $5.4 million compared to $4.2 million in 2021 representing a 28% increase. Full year product and service revenues increased to 4.9 million from 2.9 million in the prior year, representing a 68% increase, while grant revenues declined to half a million from 1.3 million, representing a 64% decrease. Margins on product and service revenues was 14.6% for the full year compared to 31.4% last year. The lower margins for the full year reflects lower margins realized in the first half of 2022 of 5% compared to 36% realized in the second half of 2022. We realized lower margins in the first half of 2022 because of a few strategic decisions we made early in the year to sell EV buses and discounted hardware as an avenue in exchange for future hardware and grid service revenue opportunities. Operating costs, excluding cost of sales, was $38.1 million for the full year 2022, compared to $29.4 million for the full year 2021. This increase was primarily attributable to higher public company fees, professional fees, and payroll and consulting costs. Other income was $12.4 million for the full year, compared with $47.4 million of expense in the prior year, an increase of $57.9 million. The year-over-year increase in other income was primarily driven by the non-cash financing costs associated with the formation of Levo of $46.8 million in 2021, plus non-cash income associated with the change in the fair value of warrants issued in connection with the formation of LIVO and non-cash income associated with the change in the fair value of warrants issued in connection with the securities purchase agreement entered into during the third quarter of 2022. Net loss attributable to common stockholders for the full year improved by $47.9 million to $24.9 million compared with $72.8 million for the full year 2021. We had approximately $15.8 million in cash as of December 31st, 2022, excluding $1.5 million in restricted cash. In the fourth quarter, we did not raise any capital. However, subsequent to the fourth quarter end, we disclosed in January that we had entered into an at-the-market or ATM offering agreement related to shares of our common stock. Given pressure on our stock price, we have used this facility sparingly in the first quarter of 2023. We also raised just under $500,000 in February through our registered direct offering. We believe our existing shelf registration, in addition to our ability to free up cash from working capital, along with our continued optimization of operating expenses, will provide us with liquidity and flexibility as we scale megawatts under management and revenues into 2023. We are also excited to announce that we have recently agreed to monetize our investment in Switch, a leader in charging infrastructure operation and maintenance software that resulted in 1.3 million in new cash proceeds received in 2023. As a reminder, Switch has developed the only charging platform that is native to plug and charge and vehicle to everything. We have worked with Switch for years, and in June 2022, we entered into an agreement with them for energy management and technology integration in order to further advance and strengthen our technology and development of V2G. At the time, we made a $1 million investment into Switch, Recently, a financing event came about that allowed us to sell our stake for a 30% return, while at the same time retaining important commercial and technology benefits of the partnership. The ability to put cash on our balance sheet in a non-dilutive way and at a favorable return, while still maintaining the various strategic benefits of this partnership, in our view, is an all-around win. Looking ahead, as we have seen year to date, our stock price remains very volatile and subject to a macro outlook that remains uncertain and subject to exogenous shocks. That being said, we remain focused on opportunities to raise capital and leverage the momentum and the underlying fundamentals of our business in the most efficient manner for our shareholders. Total cash... decreased by $5.9 million during the fourth quarter, primarily attributed to cash operating losses of $7 million offset by positive working capital. As we previously discussed, we expect to continue to generate positive working capital in future quarters, which will improve our cash burn in 2023 as we bring down our net investment in inventory and accounts receivable. Inventory decreased by $0.2 million to $11.6 million at the end of the fourth quarter from $11.8 million at the end of the third quarter 2022. We expect inventory to decline in a more meaningful fashion as our anticipated charger shipments pick up in the beginning of the year, as alluded to by Gregory. Accounts payable increased to $2.4 million at the end of the fourth quarter compared to $1.7 million at the end of the third quarter. Now, turning to megawatt thunder management and estimated future grid service revenues. As a reminder, megawatt thunder management is a metric we use to quantify the aggregated amount of electrical capacity from the deployment of our V1G and V2G chargers, which are primarily deployed in the electric school bus market in the U.S. and in light duty fleet deployments in Europe, in addition to stationary batteries. Currently, these chargers and batteries are located throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Megawatts under management increased by 7% over the third quarter, up 1.1 to 17.4 at the end of the fourth quarter 2022 from 16.3. For the full year, megawatts under management increased by 38%. Megawatts under management comprised of 9.4 megawatts from stationary batteries and 8 megawatts from EV chargers. We expect our megawatts under management to increase nicely in the coming quarters, driven by the Circle K opportunity, new school bus charging station deployments, and other commercial proposals we are working on in North America and Europe. This brings me to estimated future grid service revenues associated with our megawatts under management and megawatts to be deployed, which is based on a combination of contractor grid service revenues and merchant exposed revenues. As Gregory mentioned, we expect our charger hardware orders in Q1 of 2023 to be the strongest compared to any historical quarter in 2022 and 2021. In addition to this growth, With our expanded megawatts under management reaching 17.4 at the end of 2022 and growing further in 2023, we are now at the early stages of reaping incremental benefits of recurring grid service revenues generated by our platform. In 2023, we expect grid service revenues to outpace our strong hardware revenue growth, therefore resulting in grid service revenues making up a larger share of total revenues compared to the prior year. Depending on the geographic regions of our deployments, our grid service revenue opportunities will vary. We are currently seeing grid service revenue opportunities for vehicle-to-grid services ranging between $85 per kilowatt year up to $300 per kilowatt year in certain key markets we are focusing on. And with our planned expansion of V1G charging management services in Europe, we're seeing further grid service revenue opportunities. These revenues include a combination of contracted services and merchant-exposed services, as I previously mentioned. Given the long-term nature of our customer deployments, these revenues are generally recurring up to periods as long as 10 to 12 years. Now, turning to backlog, at December 31st, our hardware and services backlog was 4.1 million, nearly flat with Q3 of 4.2 million. We didn't realize growth and backlog in the fourth quarter as many of our customers were holding off on placing orders during the quarter in anticipation of placing orders in 2023 associated with EPA grant awards. To conclude, our outlook for 2023 is bullish. We already see this in our early 2023 results. with Q1 2023 performance expected to be strong for charger sales and with grid service revenues expected to grow at even a faster pace, expanding our top line in both categories, as well as expanding our gross margin dollars. In addition, we expect operating expenses, excluding cost of sales, to decline in Q1 2023 compared to the fourth quarter of 2022. Finally, we expect to realize meaningful reductions in net working capital further improving our cash burn. As we look out past the first quarter, we will start to realize the revenues from EPA grants awarded last year and the benefits of new grid service revenues coming online both through V1G services in Europe that we have already announced and expanded participation in V2G services in North America. Finally, we expect to grow our megawatts under management materially in 2023, which provides us the ability to earn valuable grid service revenues for Nuvi and our customers in the future. And with that, Gregory, back to you to wrap up our prepared remarks.
spk05: Thanks, David. To conclude, we are in close collaboration with our school district customers. We have been awarded EPA Clean School Bus Program, and we look forward to accepting orders in the coming months and shipping them in the quarters ahead. We are happy to see momentum building now that we are a few months into 2023, both on the hardware side as evidence of the LAUSD order and on the grid service revenue side as we seek out opportunities to layer our technology into existing infrastructure such as through the Circle K partnerships. These recently disclosed agreements, as well as our pipeline, point to an improvement in our business in 2023. This is what was a rather flattish and disappointing 2022. And we, of course, remain optimistic about the medium and long-term growth prospects for our business, as endorsed by the myriad of regulatory V2G tailwinds. We thank you for your participation, and we'd like to now turn the call back to the operators to begin our Q&A.
spk01: Operator? We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question is from Eric Stein with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk02: Hi, Gregory. Hi, David. Good morning. Good morning. Hey, so good to see the Circle K announcement. Obviously pretty exciting. Just curious, you know, could you maybe talk about how you expect that to play out, you know, in terms of the rollout over 2023 and into 2024? And then you did mention that you've got similar opportunities out there. Any color you can provide on those would be helpful.
spk05: I mean, I think it's going to be a gradual rollout, right? I mean, there are two types of resources right there. There is stationary storage, and then there are the charging stations. The storage right now is more in one region, and the charging stations are more maybe in some other region. So there is more that can be rolled out here along the year. So we need to manage this rollout process. we need to also build a better understanding of, you know, because obviously if you do grid services, you have a charging station, but also you need to have a vehicle connected to it, right, in order to provide those grid services. And so we are in the process of gathering a very high level of data to give us a very deep understanding of the full optimization we can do of those combinations. And I'm sure we're going to go through iterations So I would expect, you know, some revenue probably in Q2, but very small, but then growing into Q3 and definitely, you know, achieving a full scale, but maybe not yet fully optimized by the end of the year for the first 40 megawatts. Got it. And then just any additional opportunities? Yeah, I mean, obviously we haven't disclosed those, but obviously there is a large amount of fast chargers that are being deployed in Europe and in the U.S. And those are with no freeway type of charging stations. Now you also have some other type of depots maybe that are vehicle depots that are maybe less supportive of a full bidirectional application. but that might be a great application for unidirectional. So I would consider those two.
spk02: Okay, got it. And then maybe as we think about megawatts under management, you obviously had the announcement related to stationary batteries in Japan. I'm just curious, could you talk about the stationary opportunity? I mean, I guess it's basically equal... right now to the vehicle side in terms of megawatts under management. Now, you know, how do you see that? If you look out three to five years, do you think, you know, I mean, what does the mix look like? Is stationary? Does it remain a meaningful percentage of the mix?
spk05: I would say that there's a high probability that vehicles will be the very large proportion of the kilowatt hours that are being managed and the kilowatt that we are providing to the grid. So, definitely, you know, vehicle would be a big part, but when you look at a site, right, and you have a combination of some local generation, like solar, some local loads, some local storage, and some unidirectional and bidirectional, so V1G and V2G, you know, now you have a lot of flexibility in how you can manage a site like that. And we've always talked about kind of those islands of power that are representing this mix of local generation, local storage, local load, and V1G, V2G. And the other piece is, if our platform is really good at managing EVs, we are also really, really good at managing stationary storage. And then managing the combination of two and optimizing the value we can extract from that combination. I think we are far ahead of everybody else in how we are positioning ourselves in that specific point.
spk02: Okay. And so is it better to think about this, that stationary, you know, it's kind of each site will have a mix of all kinds. There's going to be some stationary there as opposed to, you know, potentially opportunities where it's very heavily focused on stationary storage. Is that the way to think about it?
spk05: Yeah, I mean, you know, our position is always, hey, you know, our competitive edge is in the EV space. But EV combined with stationary storage is very valuable. And so, but no, the entry point is, you know, starting with transportation, electrification, starting with transportation. That's our position.
spk02: Okay, got it. Maybe last one for me, just curious, you know, I guess what, we're still kind of waiting on or in process in terms of the first crunch of EPA funding. But any indications about your involvement? How are things coming together as you kind of get prepared for that next stage of EPA funding?
spk05: Yeah, I mean, first we are, you know, we're still working very closely with the school districts. You know, it's It's a big step, right? I mean, there was a lot of money on the school bus side in this round, but a lot of school districts were surprised by the amount of money they would have to spend on the infrastructure piece, right? And not just the charging station, but potential grid upgrades. We expect the next round to be a lot more balanced and to have a lot more... There's somebody calling here, sorry. To be a lot more balanced and to have a lot more... you know, implementation looking. So basically, you know, how is the project, you know, maybe a project that's more firm than what they were in the first round. And this is what you would expect because now with the first round, people have been thinking about it. So we expect the next round to be something where people will have more thoughts about what they need to put in place.
spk03: Okay, thank you.
spk01: The next question is from Brian Dobson with Chardon Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk04: Yeah, thanks very much for taking my question. So the Circle K partnership is very positive. I suppose as you're thinking about Europe and growth there, can you speak a little bit to the environment and tone of business there and also the opportunity for potential subsidies coming from the European government's
spk05: So, yeah, I mean, I think Europe is very interesting, right? Because this is obviously with the war in Ukraine and Russia. And, you know, this has been creating a lot of volatility on the cost of energy and the cost of electric energy being one part of it. So, one, volatility in the market. Two, markets. such as, you know, what's called SCRN, SCRD, FFR, like the market that are helping keeping the grid balanced are a lot more advanced than they are in the U.S. There is some diversity there, and that brings quite a few opportunities for us to be able to provide those grid services with as minimum as possible impact to the end user. When you go to a fast charger, you're not here to discharge your car. You're not here to even wait, you know, half an hour more in order to save, you know, their money. But if you lose, you know, 30 seconds, one minute, it's not a big deal. And that can make a big difference in the cost of that infrastructure and how that infrastructure can be deployed.
spk03: So I think that's really the advantage in this case of the European market. Yeah, very good. And then, you know,
spk04: Also a positive for next year is that potential order from the Los Angeles Unified School District. As grants are paid out from the government, what kind of incentivization do you think you'll see from other large school districts to enhance their EV bus orders?
spk05: I mean, I think that wave is happening right now, and it's not going to go back. I think the biggest hurdle is really the manufacturing process, which is, we said, we expect maybe not thousands yet, no, hundreds, but not thousands. That's probably the biggest impediment to the school bus deployment. But I think the mindset has turned. and the school districts really are ready to embrace it. They are still discovering what it takes to get there, but they are really embracing it. And especially, I think, the big school districts, you know, some of the big state owners also have been clearly pointed that out. And, you know, I think that tidal wave is moving, and this is what's really exciting about us focusing on that market, is this is coming. And, you know, hundreds, This year, thousands. Next year, that's what we can expect.
spk03: All right. Very good. Thank you.
spk01: Thanks, Brian. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Gregory Polan for any closing remarks.
spk05: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We are very excited about 2023. and we're looking forward to sharing more about the progress that we are doing into rolling out our technology with partners such as Circle K and the further wins that we are making into the school bus business. I look forward to sharing more with you at the end of the first quarter of 2023. Thank you.
spk01: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
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